The Whales of August (d. Lindsay Anderson) – The feature film
career of Lindsay Anderson (there were some TV things after, which, though I
haven’t seen Is That All There Is? or Glory! Glory!, sound by no means
negligible), the man who brought the world such wild and wildly aggressive
satires as If…, O Lucky Man! and Britannia
Hospital, ended in a seemingly unlikely way. The Whales of August, from 1987 and which Kino Lorber has just released
on Blu-ray as part of their Kino Studio classics line, was written by David
Berry, based on his own play, and is play, almost stereotypically, almost
parodically, through and through. It’s about two elderly sisters, one of them
blind, who spend their summer together in a seaside cottage that has been in
the family forever. During that time, the sisters spar, with the blind one,
Sarah, picking away at emotional scabs and unleashing a cruel streak now and
then which tests Libby, her gentler sister, who still mourns the loss of her
husband in World War II. And all this time, they await the seasonal return of
the whales to their part of the sea, a natural phenomenon that has meant much
to them ever since they were young.
So it’s about memory and death, plus whales. I have no doubt
that Anderson had deeper reasons for wanting to put this not-exactly-electric
play on the big screen, but watching it now the big idea seems to have been to
give some old Hollywood stars another swing at the ball. Bette Davis plays
Sarah, her unique vocal cadence only intensifying with age, and Lillian Gish
plays Libby. I like both of them here, though at times Gish’s movements feel
practiced. Bette Davis musters all her energy to Bette Davis the hell out of
the thing, and I can but tip my cap. Also present are Ann Sothern as a somewhat
nosy, but not unfriendly, neighbor, Harry Carey, Jr. as the local handyman, and
Vincent Price his own self as a recent widower who the ladies all like.
My instinct is to say that, with all due respect to Anderson
and the cast, it plays like a kind of novelty film – check out all these screen
legends, now very old, in one movie. Then again, I suspect I feel that way
because today no one would make a film populated almost entirely with a cast
like this unless the story was about how one of them was dying and he wanted to
blow his savings with his old pal at their favorite strip club one last time. But
The
Whales of August really does kind of just sit there. It feels like
boilerplate theater. Even if I was wrong about where exactly this would all
end, I feel like that’s only because the writer lightly tweaked things so that
it didn’t head directly into the predictable. It’s the difference between
turning right and bearing right.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi (d. Rian Johnson) – Yesterday I
learned of the existence of a petition, drawn up by some numbnuts or other on a
popular useless and meaningless petition website, called “Rian Johnson Must
Admit That The Last Jedi is Awful.” The thinking behind this, if I
understand it correctly, is that Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the latest
film in the popular franchise, is so bad that the man who wrote and directed
it, Rian Johnson must stand before the nation and tearfully (one assumes) admit
that his particular Star Wars movie is not any good at all, and, I believe it is implied,
he knew this all along. I think I have this right. (Furthermore, this petition
is seeking 1,000 signatures, a goal it may well have reached by now, so, Rian
Johnson, your day of reckoning is at hand.) If I were to dig one layer deeper
into this, what I believe I’d discover is that hardcore Star Wars fans are
fucking dipshits, a truth that I believe each layer thereafter would only
confirm. They are entitled, by and large, and quick to anger; their notions of
what a story should be, or even can
be, are a sludgy porridge of tiresome and dull theories put forth over and
over again by what’s-his-dick who wrote The Hero With a Thousand Faces and
online screenwriting guides. In their enraged insistence that art must reach
what they imagine are their own very high standards, they are in fact anti-art.
The above being the reality of the world we all inhabit,
Rian Johnson is expected to apologize for what struck me, when I saw the new
film the other day, as not especially world-upending tweaks to the universe and
characters and themes and “philosophy” thus far established in the previous Star
Wars films. In this one, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), here a major
character in the series for the first time since 1983’s Return of the Jedi, is
kind of a curmudgeon when dealing with Rey (Daisy Ridley), who has sought him
out both to help her understand her own powers, and to bring him back from his
new life as a hermit to help the new Rebellion, which is losing its war against
the new Empire. Luke doesn’t want to, and in fact wants to burn down,
literally, the world, beliefs, and history of the Jedi. Following some bad
business when attempting to train Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) some years back, Luke
became disillusioned, you see. Some fans
are taking serious issue with this portrayal of Luke because it’s only been
thirty-four years since Return of the Jedi – nobody changes
at all in that amount of time. So the thinking goes, I guess. I can tell you
that if I was Luke, I’d have reached
his point of grumpy reclusion in half that time, and by the time Rey showed up
would have gotten to the point that I’d just throw rocks at her until she went
away.
So Luke changed, as people do, but this is no good. Also I’ve
gathered that many are upset that Johnson is letting the story’s themes drift
away from the Chosen One narrative and into the idea that maybe to defeat evil
you might do better with two, even three people. I feel like that’s always sort
of been there anyway – Luke may have flourished under the construct of the
Chosen One, but in the very first movie he’d have been blown all to shit
without Han Solo swooping in like he did. Then, too, is the frustration that
with Han Solo having died in the previous film, The Force Awakens, J.J.
Abrams’s “the same but again” crowd-pleaser, and the sad death of Carrie Fisher
rendering any plans for her Leia moot, these new heroes and villains – Rey, Rebel
fighter pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), former Storm Trooper turned heroic
defector Finn (John Boyega), villainous, deeply conflicted, patricidal Jedi
prodigy Kylo Ren – don’t have the oceans of complexity within their souls to
carry one more movie. I actually saw
someone on Twitter ask those who had the audacity to enjoy The Last Jedi to reflect
on what we, the audience, knew about Luke, Han, and Leia at the end of the very
first Star Wars movie, and compare that to what we know about Rey,
Finn, and Poe. I would say “Go ahead and reflect on that, buddy.” There is a
strange delusion among Star Wars true believers that those
original, indisputably iconic characters, were somehow something other than
mythopoeic rubber stamps. What carried Han, Luke, and Leia beyond that was
Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, and Carrie Fisher (and obviously George Lucas). If
the complaint, then, is that none of these new young actors have the charm of
Harrison Ford, well, why not just ask for the moon while you’re at it. Ridley,
Isaac, and Boyega have proven over the course of these two movies that, in terms
of talent, they’re doing more than fine – I think Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver
are giving the best performances of the entire series of nine movies. No one
has been as committed to a Star Wars performance, ever, as
those two.
None of which is to say that The Last Jedi is a great
film – I don’t even think it’s a great Star Wars film. I think the first
hour or so sags under the weight of bad jokes, thin, uninteresting political
commentary that it nevertheless seems proud of, and some performances from good
actors who seem, in this environment, very uncertain (I’m thinking primarily of
Laura Dern here). But at a certain point, Rian Johnson shifts his film into
another gear, and one rousing action sequence, performance choice, or image is
stacked upon another, so that the ultimately I’ve found it hard to remember
what specifically I found so objectionable in the first hour. There’s a
lightsaber fight involving Rey and Ren that is visually one of the most
stunning things I’ve seen in a while, and emotionally intense and viscerally
absorbing, all at once. It has massive, powerful moments for the most important
characters in the series, and they work.
So what if Benicio del Toro seems to be playing Kramer from Seinfeld,
or that a decision made by one character new to the series is so wrong that
even though Johnson seems to want the audience embrace it, it’s clear that he,
himself, can’t? So what, in other words, that The Last Jedi isn’t
perfect? If that’s what you want, you haven’t seen one yet anyway, so what’re
you complaining about? In ten years, if you suddenly think “Hey The
Last Jedi is actually pretty good” keep that shit to yourself, you
fucking crybabies.
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