That's one way to boost ticket sales

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker has no cause for complaint about its box office. It may be in the final weeks of being a truly muscular performer, or those final weeks may have already come and gone. As of right now, though, its nearly six-week run has produced a certainly healthy enough $1,032,361,535 worldwide, though I'm writing this at least a day* before I will publish it. (*It ended up being four days. I'm not rechecking the numbers.) By publishing time, maybe it will have already overcome the indignity of being a couple million dollars behind Despicable Me 3. Its current earnings have it at only 39th of all time, but with a couple more weeks of decent business it should easily crack the top 30 with an outside shot at the top 20.

And the Hoyts theater chain in Australia is certainly doing its part to get the movie there.

I'm a Hoyts member -- a membership I almost never use, since I try to see movies for free and Hoyts no longer participates in my critics card program. (The handful of us who were taking advantage of that were bankrupting them, it seems.) I think those 235 points you see above are a pretty paltry total.

As a member, though, I of course receive their emails, and Friday I got one entitled "Are you the ultimate Star Wars fan?" Curious, I clicked into it, and saw the following:

"See Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker more than anyone else to win!

The HOYTS Rewards member who sees the movie the greatest number of times will score an out-of-this-galaxy prize, a Samsung Galaxy 10+ Star Wars Special Edition prize pack valued at $1,999*.

There are also three runner-up fan packs up for grabs, filled with $200+ worth of official Star Wars merch."

The devil is in the details, so of course I followed that asterisk. It did not, it turned out, contextualize the stated $1,999 value of the prize pack, though I don't suppose you'd likely be able to audit the items to determine their true value. Plus, the true value of something like a signed poster is really in the eye of whoever is setting that value, based on what the market will bear. But as this particular prize pack is not going to market, it's all just speculation.

The point is not whether it's $2,000 worth of prizes (and in a situation like this, wouldn't it behoove you to round up?). The point is that this is a really funny way to get people to buy more tickets to The Rise of Skywalker, as I doubt there is any way to determine how close you are to the goal posts.

Because I know how these things work, I seriously doubt it would be possible to buy just one more ticket than your next closest competitor. It benefits Hoyts exactly zero to make a live purchase-meter available to people who are trying to win this pack. Instead, they implicitly want people to just keep blindly buying tickets to the movie (and presumably, actually going to see the movie) until such point that they think they must have outpurchased everyone else. Without, of course, really knowing when they will have attained that goal.

I suppose there would be some people who might try. And if everyone were as cynical as I am about the wisdom of doing so, you might win with only five or six total viewings.

But if you wanted to be sure to win, it would be a similar calculation to trying to buy enough lottery tickets to increase your own odds of winning the lottery. Which, as we all know, is an impossible task. Hypothetically, you reach a certain point where you have invested enough that if you do win a small amount of money, it is not significantly greater than the amount you invested, and if you don't, which is far more likely, then it leaves you destitute.

Now hopefully, buying $2,000 worth of tickets to The Rise of Skywalker -- which would be about 95 tickets, if you're using a $21 ticket price -- would not bankrupt anyone who was enterprising enough to try it. And you'd hope those same people would know it would be easier just to try to find the items and buy them. But how much of a discount on those items would make it worth buying the tickets? Would you buy 50 tickets in the hopes of securing that prize pack at half price? What if someone else had the same idea but bought 51?

In my previous calculations, I assumed that a live purchase-meter would not be in Hoyts' best interest, but maybe it would be. Maybe it would be a bit like an auction on ebay, where you knew if you still had to bid more to win the item. It would risk getting too few bidders and giving away the prize back for too little investment, but it could also create a bidding war between the two highest contenders, and ultimately earn Hoyts more money. The problem with that is it would create a situation where all the other competitors realized they had no realistic shot and stopped buying tickets. Having everyone blind bid is probably the better way to get more tickets sold overall.

Because I know how these things work, we'll never find out. This blind auction could produce a winner who bought only three or four more tickets, given that everyone who wants to see the movie more than once has probably already seen it more than once. But it could also take in excess of 20 or 30 more tickets, and if it does, it'll leave some seriously disappointed fan who bought just a few fewer than that, and finds himself out $600 with way too much of this film's mediocre screenplay memorized.

"Retcon," that dirty word

SPOILERS

I never wrote that piece defending Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker I was planning to write. Maybe this will be a way of sort of backing into it.

I've gone back and forth on the latest/last Star Wars movie, as you recall from this piece, but I've ultimately decided that I am going to love this movie warts and all. I enjoy life better loving Star Wars. Sure, it was not exactly the movie it could have been, probably should have been. But as a lukewarm (pun intended) middle ground trying to satisfy all of us, it satisfies me plenty well.

So my hackles are definitely up when it comes to people trashing it. I don't engage them, because that's their business and it's certainly a valid reaction to Rise of Skywalker to be disappointed by it. Languish in your own misery if that makes you happy.

But the prevalence of the word "retcon" in the discussion is one of those things that makes me want to put up my dukes.

I don't think the meaning of "retcon" is inherently negative. I became aware of it too recently to say for sure. But it sure is being used like a slur in discussions of Star Wars. And no one seemed that interested in making it a household word when some of the same behavior J.J. Abrams displayed in this movie was displayed by Rian Johnson in The Last Jedi.

But first, let's define this word for those of you who may not be familiar with it, though I don't know how that could be at this point. It's both a noun and a verb, but I'll go with the verb definition since it seems to be used that way slightly more prevalently.

"To revise (an aspect of a fictional work) retrospectively, typically by introducing a new piece of information that imposes a different meaning on previously described events."

It's probably easier to think of it as short for "retroactive continuity," which summarizes it perfectly in only two words.

In a sense, you could think of "retconning" (I'll ditch the parenthesis after this instance) as always a bad thing, as it is either correcting a previous omission or second guessing one's instincts, likely for impure reasons like box office or the ongoing viability of a franchise. But that doesn't mean it should be totally risible as a narrative stratagem. The whole of Terminator 2: Judgment Day is essentially a retcon of the original Terminator, and I don't want to live in a world without T2.

But what bothers me most about the term is the way Rise of Skywalker haters are mis-using it. In the discussions I have been witness to, both online and in person, and perhaps especially in the podcasting world, the definition of retcon has gotten expanded to mean "changed a thing in a way I didn't like."

Let's take the reassembling of Kylo Ren's helmet. We always knew he liked that helmet; since it held no medical necessity for him, he wore it simply as a fashion statement, to intimidate the people he wanted to intimidate. And I venture to say that worked. He only destroyed it in a temper tantrum after Snoke called it ridiculous.

That was when he still thought he wanted to impress Snoke. But then he killed Snoke and became supreme leader himself. Like a petty political leader elected from the opposite party -- not naming any names -- he wanted to reverse every decision he didn't like under the former leader, as soon as possible. Repairing the helmet, then, was a very believable symbolic gesture for a guy who never wanted to destroy his helmet in the first place.

"Yeah, but he probably threw that broken helmet away!" the haters scream. "RET-con!"

Did he? This is the guy who has kept the charred remains of Darth Vader's helmet for something like a quarter of a century. He worships it like you would worship at an altar. Kylo Ren is a hoarder. He totally has that shattered helmet. And even if he didn't, he made it once, so why couldn't he make it again? I'm sure someone took a picture of him while he was wearing it.

It's not that the reassembling of the helmet is an instance of retroactive continuity. You can actually fairly easily follow the chronology if you choose to. It's that they felt Abrams was essentially saying "Fuck you" to Rian Johnson by reversing a decision Johnson had made in his previous film. That may be petty, but it's not a retcon.

And I've decided I don't think it's petty either, or if it is, it's no more petty than Johnson saying "Fuck you" to Abrams by suggesting that the helmet he loved so much is stupid. Abrams may have ended it, but Johnson started it.

Okay, so let's move on to an example that is closer to the actual definition of "retcon."

"I hate how they just retconned the end of Return of the Jedi by bringing back the Emperor."

Sure, we all thought Palpatine was dead after Darth Vader threw him down a bottomless shaft. But Palpatine is hardly the only Star Wars character to survive falling down such an abyss. In fact, you might suggest that this is the least effective way to kill someone who is force sensitive. Luke survived it, albeit on a smaller scale, and as of Solo: A Star Wars Story we now know for sure that Darth Maul also survived it, something that has been explored more fully in the (now defunct) extended universe.

So the most powerful Sith lord of all time shouldn't have survived it? Even if he didn't, George Lucas himself laid the groundwork for the "unnatural abilities" necessary to resurrect the dead in Revenge of the Sith. If anything, we've known for 14 years that it was possible to use Sith powers to prevent someone from dying or to bring them back. That Palpatine himself would use that power, or at least be the beneficiary of it, is perhaps the best case of continuity we have with those prequels.

So then there were the people who were annoyed with the way Abrams retconned things within the movie itself. I have to admit that bugged me a little too, but the biggest instance of that is actually not a retcon, something you will know if you saw the movie at least twice, like I did.

The moment where Chewbacca is supposedly killed in a prison transport leaving the surface of the planet Pasaana is, understandably, played for all its potential emotional stakes. Did we really just see this franchise's answer to the beloved family dog just blow up in a fiery wreck?

Of course we didn't, most of us knew even when it happened, if not for optimistic reasons (they would never do that to Chewbacca) then for cynical reasons (J.J. Abrams would never have the guts to do that to Chewbacca). But when we see him alive later on Ren's ship, most of us, not only the haters, thought "What? They just decided to retcon a second prison transport ship?"

Except they didn't.

When you first see Chewbacca being arrested and loaded onto the prison transport, there is, quite clearly, a second transport parked next to it. We didn't notice it the first time because we didn't think it would be important information to glean from the scene. But that just makes the trick better. It's playing with our emotions, sure, but it's not bullshit. That second transport was there, and it only makes sense that it would be the second transport, the one not carrying the dangerous prisoner who has been a part of every major siege against the Empire, the First Order and the Sith over the past 30 years, that would stay behind on the planet to collect up any last stragglers, while the first transport would be carrying that Wookiee up to the ship quick smart.

Sure, there are probably some instances of retconning in The Rise of Skywalker that I would agree with and have legitimate beefs with. I choose not to think about them because I choose to love The Rise of Skywalker, which I think makes me a more enjoyable person to hang out with.

But the champions of the word retcon are basically using it as a catch-all term to describe the following frustration: "I liked the changes Rian Johnson made in Star Wars, and J.J. Abrams took all that away from me."

That's fine. That's a legitimate reaction. But different filmmakers make movies in different ways, and Disney clearly decided they wanted Abrams, not Johnson, to bring the series home for them. They thought Abrams was more likely to deliver what they considered to be a fitting conclusion to the series, while Johnson would be more likely to blow up the Millennium Falcon or have Poe and Finn kiss. (So, you know, Disney is not right about everything.)

The point is, Abrams wanted to conclude the trilogy the way he started it, and if anything, he's showing continuity with his own instincts. He's being consistent, while Johnson was the one throwing a wrench into the works. Whether that was a needed wrench or not is a thing people can and will debate forever.

Look, both of them fail at the basic rules of improv. Improvisational comedy rules state that when a fellow improvising comedian presents you with a scenario, you don't reject it. You say, "Yes, and." You build on this random piece of information the other person has presented you. You can and should ultimately take it in a new direction after paying due respect to the idea that was bequeathed you, but you don't just say "No, that's a dumb idea, I refuse to do it."

J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson would be no good at improv. But they are good filmmakers, and each believes passionately in his vision for a franchise that we have all loved since we were little kids.

Me, I'm just glad I got to see a little bit of what each had to offer.

The year of endings

Given that 2019 is the last year of the 2010s, it seems only natural that we’d be thinking about endings.

What doesn’t necessarily follow, though, is that so many popular franchises would have been geared toward a natural 2019 endpoint in their own chronologies.

No popular cultural commodity can be packed away for good, so in many cases, what we’re talking about here is a pause in the action. But it’s a big pause with a big symbolic value, even if it ends up proving to be a short one.

That this should coincide with the end of a decade is, to be certain, a coincidence. It must be. No franchise starts with the idea of wrapping it up by a certain symbolic date, if only because most franchises can’t be sure they will endure long enough to get there. The point it starts is entirely a function of when its perceived viability has reached a critical threshold in order to make it into a film (or a TV show, as we shall see). The point it finishes, then, is usually a function of x number of consecutive production schedules until the entirety of the story has been told.

For whatever reason, that entirety really descended on us in 2019.

SOME SPOILERS, TREAD CAREFULLY

Let’s look at the examples:

Star Wars – This is the big one, as a story dating back 42 years, with many of the same actors, finally reached its conclusion in 2019. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is not, of course, the last Star Wars movie we will ever see. In fact, it’s almost certain that 20 years from now, we’ll already have as many more Star Wars movies as we’ve gotten in the last 42. But as the end of the Skywalker saga, or at least the end of the actual Skywalker bloodline, it’s a pretty big deal. Sure, Daisy Ridley may say now that she’s done with Star Wars, but I also read that she went and cried alone in her car after seeing the final cut. Emotionally, she’s susceptible to returning, and she adopted the name Skywalker after all. But there’s no doubt that for now, this is an ending, and it’s a big one.

Avengers – It’s hard to feel like a saga has come to an end when a new movie featuring some of the same characters comes out scarcely two months later. But there’s no arguing that Avengers: Endgame represented a real culmination of 11 years’ worth of movies that had preceded it, and that you definitively draw a line when you halve the total of six original Avengers in one fell swoop. Of course, in the perfect example of pop culture’s perennial self-rejuvenation, one of the deceased Avengers is actually getting her own movie just a couple short months from now, albeit a prequel (or so it would seem). Still, to measure just how much of an effect the MCU has had on us, many of us (myself included?) were sadder to see the end of this story than the end of Star Wars. And walking out of that theater back in April, it sure did feel like an ending.

Game of Thrones – Apologies if I switch to TV on a film blog, but GOT is one of the most cinematic TV shows we’ve ever gotten, and in the past decade, its cultural cachet came to rival the two mentioned above and the likes of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. That too came to an end in 2019, though I’m sure we’ll get The Further Adventures of Tyrion Lannister at some point in the next decade. The final season of Game of Thrones was heavily criticized in certain corners of the internet, as well as off it, as you didn’t have to be a geek to get involved in this epic of swords and dragons, breasts and beheadings. For me, the final season flashed moments of brilliance and moments of great disappointment, though more disappointment in the way our heroes can let us down than the way the writers botched the job of telling their story. And for me, it was another sentimental end to a saga I’d been living with for years.

Breaking Bad – While we're on TV ... Breaking Bad should have ended years ago, but since Vince Gilligan decided we needed a conclusion to the story of Jesse Pinkman, we got a movie that did that in 2019. Although the movie was received well in most circles (though not this circle), I suspect Gilligan won't decide he needs to wrap up any more characters, making this the final chapter in the story of these characters, in any case. Unless he gets the bad idea for Breaking Bad: Alaska, which, I hope not. 

Toy Story – So if Toy Story 3 wasn’t really the end, then Toy Story 4 surely is, isn’t it? Never say never, but for now, it does seem like Pixar is ready to move on from the story of Buzz, Woody, Bo Peep et al, delivering the final installment of their story in 2019. There’s nothing that states this has to be the end, except for the perceived catcalls of Pixar fans who thought a fourth movie was already a bridge too far. But at the very least, it’ll be hard to imagine how Woody will reunite with the legacy of Andy and his family friends, represented most distinctly by the gaggle of toys who do remain together at the end of this one.

X-Men – Not all conclusions had a sentimental quality to them. Given the general response of sheer exhaustion and disinterest by fans, they didn’t want to let the door hit X-Men on the ass on its way out. Dark Phoenix was always envisioned as the end point to this particular iteration of the X-Men franchise, but after the way the last two films were resoundingly rejected, it could be a stake to the heart of the franchise on the whole. If so, it’ll leave a bad taste.

It – Okay, so the first chapter of It was only two years ago. But this is definitely the last chapter, unless someone wants to pull some silly stunt like getting these actors together again in three decades, Before Sunrise style, to have them fight Pennywise as 70-year-olds. I include it here more for the way the poster added to the symbolic trend I’m exploring today. The tagline reads simply: “It ends.”

How to Train Your Dragon – Okay, I didn’t even see The Hidden World, which came out in early January in Australia (I was invited to a preview screening in 2018, as a matter of fact). I guess I tired of seeing these movies before they tired of making them. However, they have now tired of that, as producer Dean DeBlois confirmed they don’t intend to make any more. Right, and Sylvester Stallone didn’t intend to make any more Rocky movies after Rocky IV.

Rambo – Another one I didn’t see, but since the aforementioned Sylvester Stallone is now 73, it’s reasonable to believe the promise implicit in the title Last Blood. And since I didn’t see it, I have no idea if Last Blood puts a definitive ending to the story of John Rambo. But whether it does or not, this is actually a pretty big one, as the character has cinematic origins older than any other character on this list save Luke Skywalker.

And this is to say nothing of the franchises that may have practically ended due to poor box office, whether they intended to or not (Terminator, Charlie’s Angels), and the movies that felt like they were career summations based on the age of the director (The Irishman, Pain and Glory).

So yeah, it seems that 2019 was a year for us to look back on the past and kill it, to quote Rian Johnson’s version of Kylo Ren.

But 2020 is not only the start of a new year, it’s the start of a new decade. It seems likely that we’ll get more recycling of franchises that haven’t yet worn out their welcome. But don’t forget that when the last decade started, most of us hadn’t even heard of Game of Thrones or How to Train Your Dragon, and the MCU was in its comparative infancy at only two years old.

Ten years from now, we might be mourning the endings of things we haven’t yet imagined.

Qui-Gon Jinn reads The Polar Express

I've had Star Wars on the brain this holiday season, as you can tell from my last x number of posts.

So it was appropriate that none other than Qui-Gon Jinn read us The Polar Express on Christmas Eve.

Chris Van Allsburg's 1985 storybook is a Christmas tradition that I have brought from my own childhood into my children's childhoods. But there are specific rules around this tradition; the story gets read only once each year, that being Christmas Eve.

Except not this year, it appeared.

Despite reminding myself not to forget it when packing for our trip to Tasmania, I did indeed leave behind our weathered copy of the story -- the one from my childhood -- on our bookshelf at home.

I remembered it at dinner on Monday night, and immediately felt dismayed.

Then yesterday I got an idea. What if the internet could read it to us?

Of course the internet could do that. In fact, Liam Neeson could do it.

The first result when I searched "polar express storybook" on YouTube was, indeed, a 16-minute reading of the story by the world's most prominent Irish actor. And though there were some things he said earlier in the year that made me sort of want to cancel him, well, it's Christmastime, a time for forgiveness.

Plus, I'd just heard his voice -- twice now -- in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

So we pulled up to the hearth of my laptop -- my wife, my kids, my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law -- and listened to Neeson's marvelous brogue read my beloved Christmas Eve story, the one that distills the magic of Christmas in a way that never quite extinguishes, no matter how old you get or how many stressors undermine your holiday season.

And even though there was music, which didn't always work, and even though some pages were lingered on longer than it seemed they needed to be, and even though the camera moved across the page rather than giving us a full still image of each glorious page in Van Allsburg's book, it was my traditional fulfilled, and Christmas is all about tradition.

What's more, the looks on the faces of my family seemed to involve genuine joy, both those who knew the story well and those who were hearing it for the first time.

Merry Christmas, and may the force be with you.

Second Skywalker is the charm

Can I start talking about Star Wars yet?

I'll give you a spoiler warning before I delve into anything really serious in this post, but I've got a few more paragraphs before that time rolls around.

One thing you know for sure, whether you've seen The Rise of Skywalker or not, is that it has been divisive. Some people do love it, but more seem to hate it -- or at least those who hate it have taken command of the narrative around this film.

One thing you may not know, though, is that it's better the second time.

The conventional wisdom should state that a film has its greatest impact on you the first time, as you are being freshly introduced to its winning elements and have the thrill of surprise in your corner as well. With a Star Wars movie, though, it may be a little different. You need one viewing just to comprehend the new information being fed to you, and to wrap your mind around the fact that what you're witnessing is essentially new threads in a sacred text.

But new anything does not always go down well the first time. Sometimes you have to see it a second time for the incorporation to be complete.

I got that chance yesterday morning in Devonport, Tasmania, scarcely an hour after disembarking from the ferry that brought my car and me over to this island from mainland Victoria. I camped out last night and have joined my wife and my sons (who flew down today), as well as my sister-in-law and my mother-in-law, in the southern part of the state on the Tasman Peninsula, where we will spend Christmas.

I knew I wanted to see something, and I thought that thing would be Frozen II at 9:30. (It was an all-night ferry ride.) But in killing some time before the start of the movie, I listened to the Filmspotting guys do their own discussion of The Rise of Skywalker, and that made me realize that I wanted to see it again. Not only that, but now was the time, or never. After Boxing Day, I'll have a half-dozen new releases to consider seeing to add them to my 2019 list. There'll be no time for Star Wars then.

The first showing of Rise of Skywalker of the day was starting just 15 minutes after that, and would leave me all afternoon to do some last-minute shopping before arriving at my campsite.

Upon completion, my 3.5 star rating of the film shot up at least a half-star, and I'm inclined to say it'd be a full star if that didn't seem to disregard some of the film's undeniable weaknesses. Four point five stars was what I gave The Force Awakens, still my favorite in this trilogy, but Rise of Skywalker ends up in the same ballpark of quality for me after that second viewing.

In a way I think this is crazy. My brief summary of this movie, which I gave a couple others who had also seen it, was along the lines of "Although it had basically everything I wanted it to have, my overall impression was that it was slightly 'less than.'" In fact, after initially convincing myself that it fell between The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi for me, I started to wonder if Last Jedi weren't the superior film.

So what exactly did that second viewing do for me?

For one, it allowed me to understand the connective tissue between scenes that had seemed way too hurried the first time, when I was failing to follow each movement in the quest narrative. It's not nearly as shoddy or poorly explained as I thought, it's just that each new wrinkle in the quest is quickly explained without being belabored. It's almost a model of narrative efficiency by J.J. Abrams, despite it seeming to some people like indulgence/inefficiency to have all those different scenes and planets in the first place. Those people are wrong, and my second viewing confirmed it for me.

My second viewing also allowed me to become emotional in scenes where I had not the first time. It was not that I didn't experience emotions the first time, but that they were intensified the second time, perhaps a result of knowing where things were going. There were actual tears at least once.

If I hadn't watched this movie again, I was ready to let it become mired in my 50s or 60s on my year-end list. Now I'm glad to say that it will be quite a bit higher than that ... and that I'm kind of plotting, though not very seriously, how I might even squeeze in a third viewing.

So the message to you is: If you love Star Wars, but you didn't love this movie, give yourself another chance to love it.

Well, I didn't get to any spoilers after all, and tomorrow I think I finally have to write my first Christmas post.

But you won't be sick of Star Wars talk yet after Christmas, will you? And then you really will all have seen it, and this tiptoeing around spoilers won't be necessary.

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.

My last midnight Star Wars

Tonight, a bunch of things end.

Never say never, but I doubt I’ll be watching the various new Star Wars spinoffs at 12:01 a.m. Australia time, even if it will give me bragging rights over all you who have to wait 24-48 hours beyond that to see the movie.

Because will any new Star Wars movie be as momentous as this one?

This is the end of a saga that began 42 years ago, when more than half the world’s population was not yet alive, when we didn’t know Luke Skywalker from Luke Starkiller, Chewbacca from tobacco and stormtroopers from … well, the Nazi variation thereof.

Sure, what transpires in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will probably bear very little resemblance to the twinkle in George Lucas’ eye back in the mid-1970s. As much as he may say he knew about where the whole saga was going, he hasn’t had much say in its ending, as it turns out.

I’m not finding that to make the experience any less pure. It’s the same actors – those who are still alive, anyway, and some appearing posthumously – plus the return of one we haven’t seen since the early 20^th century, and one we haven’t seen since 1983. It may have been George Lucas’ story, but in terms of what’s up there on the screen, it’s their story, and that matters.

In terms of my actual plan, I almost titled this post “A Hoyts for every Star Wars.”

Seeing Star Wars movies at midnight started for me in 2015 with The Force Awakens, the result of my wife buying me a ticket for my birthday. (Yes, Star Wars tickets were already available in late October.) That was at the Hoyts at Melbourne Central.

In 2017 I hit up the Hoyts at Hightpoint Shopping Centre, as that was more convenient for the two guys I was seeing it with. (Plus, I’d gone there to see Rogue One the year before, which I’m not including in the current calculation because it’s not part of this saga, and because I don’t like it very much.)

Now in 2019 I’m seeing The Rise of Skywalker at a Hoyts that didn’t exist for the previous two releases, the Docklands Hoyts, which I only attended for the first time last year to see The Grinch. (And what a memorable viewing experience that was.) This is the closest to my house, and involves only an easy ten-minute bike ride home along a bike path at 3 in the morning.

I’m sure I’ll have follow-up posts with my thoughts on the movie, so I’ll keep this preview post short.

But 24 hours from now, I’ll be groggy at work, wondering how I’m going to get through the day, hopefully still delirious with the joy of a successful conclusion to one of my life’s great adventures.

No pressure, right?

Star Wars will end without my kids

I'm pretty excited for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. But it's an abstract excitement based on almost no imagery from the movie. I've (mostly) kept up my same strategy as for the last two movies in this saga, where I avoided trailers. I'd have been 100% successful in that effort except that an ad came on while I was watching an on-demand version of Survivor, of all shows, last night, and I did not turn my eyes away from it.

I'll even be preparing for it by re-watching The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi in the two nights leading up to it. I'm devoting Monday and Tuesday nights of that week to my fifth (!) viewing of Episode VII and my modest third viewing of Episode VIII, before I am among the first in the world to access Episode IX Wednesday night at midnight.

Unfortunately, I don't really have anyone to share this momentous occasion with, at least not locally.

I did watch The Last Jedi with two "mates," two years ago, but only one of them was really geeked for the midnight showing while the other one went along with a skeptical look in his eye, and ultimately regretted his decision. Barring last-minute plans, I doubt we'll be doing that again.

But I'm not bemoaning the lack of physical companionship in watching this movie, as I only watch maybe one out of every 40 movies I see in the theater with another person. (Adult movies, that is -- my kids join me more frequently for movies aimed at them.) As a film critic as well as a person who can't regularly see movies with his wife because of babysitting considerations, I usually go alone. And don't think twice about it, if I ever did.

No, what's really giving me a mild case of the blues is that I won't have been able to share any part of this Star Wars experience with the people whose excitement would nourish me the most: my kids.

When Star Wars restarted in 2015, it was a few years too early to really be appropriate for my kids. My older son was only five and a couple months then, my younger son almost two. Now granted, I was not even four yet when I saw the original Star Wars in the theater, but those were different times.

I guess I hoped that as they got a little older, my kids would catch up with the Star Wars series and might watch either The Last Jedi or The Rise of Skywalker in the theater with me. Fast forward a few years, and the older is now a couple months past his ninth birthday, the younger one nearly six.

These midnight screenings have become a fun tradition for me, but I'd trade them without a thought if it meant getting to share the experience with my kids, even if we had to wait three days after opening to see it on the weekend. How sweet that period of excitement and anticipation would be, as we all wondered what would become of Rey, Finn, Kylo Ren and the rest.

Something went wrong somewhere along the way.

In the same Christmas season that The Last Jedi came out, we watched the original Star Wars with the kids, and they liked it. The plan was to watch one movie each Christmas season, which would have only brought us to Return of the Jedi this year. But I could have stepped up the pace if they were really loving it, and we could have whipped through the prequels (if need be) as well as the last two new movies in order to prepare for Rise of Skywalker.

Instead, the pace went in the other direction. No one seemed to show much enthusiasm for The Empire Strikes Back last year, so it simply never got watched.

That lack of enthusiasm has continued. When I mention Star Wars to the older one, he tells me he's not really sure if he likes it. Even though Star Wars as a worldwide phenomenon is as strong as ever -- just look at how The Mandalorian has dominated social media, without me unfortunately -- it's apparently not something that his friends talk about very much. Which is not to say he would suddenly becomes obsessed if his friends were talking about it, but it sure would help.

If the older one's not interested, I'm not sure if it even helps for me to get the younger one interested. Especially as I secretly still think some of the stuff in these movies would be too intense for him. (I couldn't handle Han Solo getting a lightsaber through the stomach at age 42, so I don't have any idea how he'd react at age 5.)

Funny thing is, when I came home from the library with my rented copies of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi on Thursday (I don't have Disney+ yet, as alluded to above), I squelched an opportunity to pique their interests. I usually place library rentals on a bookshelf near our TV, for all to see. But in this case I stored them in our bedroom, where the kids don't spend very much time.

See, I didn't want them to suddenly get interested in Star Wars and ask to see these two movies before they'd seen the others. In my ideal world, I even want to submit them to the prequels before these movies. Same order as the order I saw them, in an ideal world.

So at this point I am going it alone, even without my wife, who will undoubtedly see this movie in the theater but does not express very much ongoing interest about it.

The good news -- if you want to call it good news -- is that Disney is not nearly done delivering Star Wars to us.

I may not be able to finish the Skywalker storyline with my children, but maybe that's okay, since I didn't start it with them either. Maybe the real goal will be to meet whatever new characters Star Wars gives us next, together, and go on that adventure from start to finish, with the same emotional journey. I can't remember who's responsible for the next installment of Star Wars movies at the moment -- I know both Rian Johnson and the Game of Thrones creators are out -- but whoever it is, there's some hope it will be allowed to be new and fresh, something we can discover simultaneously, without carrying in the baggage of our own personal Star Wars histories or lack thereof, without excessive fan service and baby Yodas.

So having just shed my "mild blues" about things I can no longer undo, maybe now I'm free to just concentrate on the end of my own emotional journey -- a journey that began back in 1977.

No better than Cobra or the Silver Surfer

Star Wars titles have never been a paragon of cleverness, but sometimes they have at least been distinctive (The Phantom Menace) or poetic (The Last Jedi).

Rarely are they derivative of trends that have been so beaten into the ground, I wrote a blog post parodying the trend a whole five years ago.

That was this post, in which I bemoaned the lame over-usage of the word "rise" in movie titles. Now, a Star Wars movie has succumbed to that deader than dead trend.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is the title of the last movie in the Skywalker saga, the implications of that title notwithstanding. It's not a great title (and does have me asking a lot of questions), but I don't object to the Skywalker name drop. It's the use of "rise" that gives me pause.

You may recall (if you haven't clicked on the link above) that the impetus for my complaints over "rise" was The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Rise of Electro, though it turned out that was only a title used in Australia and some other non-U.S. territories. But other titles with some variation on that naming convention, that were used domestically in the U.S., were Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

Any time a Star Wars movie is taking leads from Fantastic Four and G.I. Joe, it's time to be worried.

Of course, I don't for a moment believe that a title previews the potential quality of the film itself, so I'm not really worried. However, questionable decisions are questionable decisions, and it's hard to know for sure to what extent they permeate the project.

Unlike millions of people I have not watched the teaser trailer, and I think I will continue with what has been my standard practice for a good five years now, which is to take whatever measures I can to avoid trailers of movies I'm excited about seeing. But I have seen a couple stills from the trailer (accidentally, while googling for the image above), and I must say it's exciting to be within eight months of another full-on, non-spinoff Star Wars movie.

I just hope it's not the last one I ever care about. I'd like Star Wars to keep rising, even as the Skywalker saga falls.