Last, But Not Ultimate - Some thoughts on The Last Jedi and far away galaxies

There are few cinematic experiences that can recreate the feeling of being a kid.  There is a rare thrill to be had when the Jurassic Park soundtrack for the first time in years, or when you hear the Indiana Jones theme swell (whatever the quality of the film…).  One of the few film series able to summon both nostalgia and cultural currency is Star Wars.  Once thought dead and buried under three prequels worth of George Lucas’ self indulgence, it has awoken thanks (whatever you may think of their influence) to Disney’s desire to build a new franchise.

Now this emotional connection is a huge part of the enjoyment of Star Wars; the ability to conjure childhood memories while showing you exciting new things, occurs almost nowhere else in popular culture.  It is also a huge problem, for example when filmmakers have the audacity to try new things.  George Lucas, who in fairness is free to do whatever the hell he wants with Star Wars,  was guilty of introducing ‘midichlorians’, offering a physical explanation for the force.  Swing and a miss in trying to demystify the mysterious.  New is not always welcome when you’re messing with somebody’s childhood love.

 JJ Abrams’ The Force Awakens nailed everything you would want from a Star Wars film: the light tone, the overwhelming enemy and underdog resistance, dogfights and lightsabre battles, the hint at something grander and more mysterious at work.  However, the main criticism levelled at the 2015 film (aside from pube-less misogynist keyboard warriors complaining about an all-powerful female character, and using their mother’s Wi-Fi to do so) was that it was, beat-for-beat, a cover version of A New Hope, even down to the tragic character death.  It also managed a tricky feat, which remakes, reboots, and retcons (the recent Alien films, Indiana Jones 4, any remake of a Paul Verhoeven film) tend to get horribly wrong: adding engaging new characters that you actually cared about.

Filmmakers now find themselves in a bind, tightened by competing factions of nerds, whose complaints are directly contradictory: don’t change anything about the thing I love, but make each one different to what we’ve seen before.  Rogue One, whose function was to plug a gap between episodes and not further the main story, is excused from criticism by virtue of being totally awesome.

And so we come to The Last Jedi.  After a largely positive reaction to TFA, the anticipation levels were higher than Anakin’s midichlorian count.  Speculation mounted that it would be ‘the dark middle film’ like Empire Strikes Back, that villain Snoke would be [insert ludicrous theory here], and that Rey’s family would definitely, without question, be powerful Jedi knights that we’d seen before (despite them all being dead and the 30-year time difference making no sense).

As done with the original trilogy, directorial duties had been handed off, this time to Rian Johnson; a man whose films tend not to feature much levity and have genre boundaries greyer than Skywalker’s beard.  Surprisingly, Johnson has made a very light film: from the priceless moment where Poe Dameron throws some shade the way of General Hux by pretending to be on hold and not hear his monologue of threats, to General Leia’s “what are you looking at me for? Follow him!” there are just enough funny beats.  This is important: if you don’t add levity like this, you run the risk of lengthy conversations about senates and trade embargoes.  Films about telekinetic space monks, intergalactic war, and a yeti with a crossbow, which borrow heavily from Hamlet and Kurusawa need a dose of humour. Po-faced doesn’t gel with porgs, wookies, and a goblin with poor syntax, so the humorous tone is just what is needed.  My favourite part: Chewie cooking a porg in front of horrified on looking porgs.

Plot-wise, this is a very different beast to what we’ve seen before.  A thoroughly pissed-off First Order are closing in on the remnants of the Rebellion and despite an early victory, the rebels find themselves pursued by Snoke’s ship, with dwindling fuel and an against-the-orders scheme the only way for them to get away.  It annoyed me that despite seeing several Rebel ships escape at the start of the film, we are told that there are only three remaining.  This adds an element of peril but feels cheap.  The Rebel escape plan is the film’s weakest part: John Boyega’s Finn finds himself on an opulent casino planet with an irritating sidekick, looking for a codebreaker who can facilitate the Rebel escape.  This whose sequence suffers from an abundance of needless CGI animals and a class-war subtext which just doesn’t fit.  Subsequent plot developments also render it pointless.

The film opens and closes really well but suffers from a huge lull in the middle, including the above casino planet sequence.  Part of this lull is the anticipated Rey-and-Luke part, in which Luke refuses and then agrees to train Rey as a Jedi, and his recluse status is explained.  An underrated actor – Luke had the biggest character arc of the original trilogy – Mark Hamill does his best work here as a traumatised, conflicted Luke.  Following the path taken by both Yoda and Obi Wan Kenobi, his failures and fears have driven him to seclusion and forced him to turn his back on The Force.  With hints that Rey could follow Kylo Ren’s route to the Dark Side, and Luke’s fear of that exact thing, this makes for a fascinating deepening of Rey’s story but is very dialogue heavy.  The rumoured attack by the Knights of Ren doesn’t happen but this part of the film desperately needed something like that.  Luke’s nonchalant dismissal of his own lightsabre, however, is priceless.

As Rebel plans come to a head, we see a failed mutiny, a failed stealth mission, and a semi-failed escape, all of which add to the increasing sense of peril.  The identity of Supreme Leader Snoke was the source of much rumour-mongering and those same nerds will be disappointed that he isn’t given more of a backstory.  What he is given, however, is a huge amount of power and a strange vulnerability.  His desire to recruit blank-slate Rey as his new apprentice leads to him shunning Kylo and ultimately his death.  A sucker for a great villain, I would have liked to see more from him, but his death will lead to the conflicted Klyo’s ascension to Big Bad.  His death leads to the coolest lightsabre battle seen in a good while but he feels kind of underused, in that Kylo doesn’t seem any more powerful for it.

Changes to Luke’s character have been one of the more complained-about subjects, however these make perfect sense when the full picture is revealed.  Both Yoda and Kenobi ran and hid from their fears and failures.  Luke and Kylo give slightly differing accounts of what happened (another Kurusawa reference, samurai fans), and Luke’s arc reaches a satisfying conclusion when he embraces his position and returns to the fray.  His ruse makes for a wonderful moment where he faces down Kylo with faint echoes of Kenobi taking on Vader.  Yes, Luke’s character is different and Johnson’s choices for him are iconoclastic, but that’s what makes it so good.

The best thing about The Last Jedi is its bravery in ignoring the expectations and doing new things with the characters.  There are no set rules for what The Force can or cannot do, or where this universe can or cannot go, and Kudos for Johnson for making what feels like a complete film and not just filler material between episodes 7 and 9.  The final episode can be approached with a blank slate and two opposing forces whose allegiances to Light and Dark are not 100% clear.  What he doesn’t do so well is keep the pace for the duration.  There is also the strange treatment of Carrie Fisher in what turned out to be her final role.  The decision not to kill Leia when the chance was presented remains one of the film’s weakest moments: it’s silly, confusing, has very limited foregrounding in the previous films (although it’s hinted that Leia is force-sensitive), and given Fisher’s tragic passing, now impossible to follow up.

Like Skywalker himself, it isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough to sit alongside the greats, even if there are moments of madness.  Where we go from here is, again, tantalisingly far, far away from being known.

Is It A Wonderful Life..? Ruining a Christmas classic

Newcastle boasts a fine independent cinema (The Tyneside) and one of its finest events is the annual screening of Frank Capra’s 1946 masterpiece It’s A Wonderful Life in the weeks leading to Christmas.  Massively popular, each year thousands of punters turn up to watch James Stewart’s George Bailey lose and then spectacularly recover his will to live, and in doing so help an angel get his wings.  70 years on and it has lost not an ounce of its power to fill the viewer full of hope and make them appreciate the good will of their fellow man.  For me, seeing It’s A Wonderful Life here marks the start of Christmas, and hopefully the only time of the year where I cry in public.

The gut reaction is that this is a wholly good and hopeful fable about a man who sacrifices himself time and again for the good of his town, and is rewarded for it in his time of need.  It makes you feel warm inside and makes you want to do good things; it reminds you that a kinder world is a better world.  And don’t get me wrong, this is the appropriate reaction to this film.  But I am now going to try to spoil it for you, so please stop reading if you don’t want your next Christmas ruined by a blogger who probably doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Made after World War 2, at a time when Capra and Stewart wanted to make people feel better after the world had been devastated by Holocaust, war and nuclear bombs.  The world was in a mess and people were struggling to cope with incalculable horrors, so a film culminating in an overwhelmingly positive message really meant something.  But consider George Bailey’s character: all he wanted to do was “shake off the dust of this crummy little town and see the world!” and by the time the story ends that’s the one thing he hasn’t done.  Bailey is our protagonist; Stewart, the ultimate everyman, is noble and normal, not what you’d classically call heroic.  As our onscreen proxy, he singularly fails to achieve any of his ambitions.  He never leaves Bedford Falls, never sees the world, never does what he so dearly wanted to do.  For such a wholly good man, he is not rewarded by getting the one thing he desires.  While this self-sacrifice, and the power of the individual, is largely what Capra is promoting as important, there is something very sad about George Bailey’s geostationary life.

In cinema, America often has a problem with small towns. Davids Lynch and Cronenberg used them as settings for violent and downright bizarre events in Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, and A History Of Violence. Hitchcock used one as a murderer’s hiding place in Shadow Of A Doubt. Viewing them as a microcosm for the larger society, films like Invasion of The Body Snatchers made barely masked political statements about perceived dangers of communism.  Bedford Falls is squarely aligned with the latter, with Capra using the town to demonstrate the importance of collaboration, of sacrifice, and of seeing your own importance to the rest of society.  What this implicitly does is criticise the self-interest and ambition that goes hand in hand with American capitalism.  That’s right: the all-American, staunchly Republican James Stewart made a pro-Socialist Christmas film.

Although the equally-Republican Capra likely saw his films as demonstrating a stance against corruption and in favour of individualism, it’s possible to view It’s A Wonderful Life as promoting social endeavour (the Bailey Building and Loan a ‘thorn in the side’ of the bank).  Imagine for a moment what an individualist George Bailey would do; a fully Capitalist George Bailey would not make his raison d’etre the welfare of a small town that he sees as a millstone around his neck.  A George Bailey following an American individualist ideology would have left Bedford Falls, made a fortune, and allowed that money to trickle on down to his former neighbours. But Carpa’s film preaches that there is more moral value in helping society than oneself; the antithesis of what would become the Reaganite mantra 40 years later.

The character of Potter would surely represent Capra and Stewart’s Republican ideal.  Somewhere between the Monopoly Man and Donald Trump, he is the arch Capitalist, loathsome and alone.  Capra even presents him in a Satanic light: the scene where he attempts to buy off George Bailey only to be thwarted by a handshake, Potter’s name is kept in frame, written in reverse. The fantasy of Pottersville, a sleazy, base version of Bedford Falls, is Capra’s warning about the danger of rampant capitalism leading to moral decay.  In short, Las Vegas.  What Potter represents is thus: there is only evil in the accumulation of wealth, in living life for oneself, yet there is nobility in poverty.  In a classical sense, this is not what you would call The American Way, but a humane, socially conscious view of life.  If I were Senator McCarthy, I would be starting my witch hunt at Carpa’s office.

Politics aside, why does It’s A Wonderful Life seem better with each passing year?  It seems to be because there’s an inversely proportionate relationship between it, and how wonderful life actually is.  Life gets harder, we live under increasing pressure to earn, to do the best for ourselves, and see the increasing damage done by Potter’s progeny across the world.  Pottersville is spreading, and there is an increasing need to cling to something wholly good and innocent.  We need more George Baileys; people who will put the needs of others before their own.

So while I’m doing my best to ruin what is probably the best Christmas film for you, I still love it, love what it means, and love how for 2 hours it can transport you into a more wonderful version of life.  For you, for me, for everyone in Bedford Falls; for everyone except George Bailey. 

Gig Review: Enter Shikari, Newcastle Arena 19/11/17

I wasn’t a fan of Enter Shikari until recently.  A term which is vastly and lazily overused, ‘crossover’ music held no appeal to me when they debuted in 2007.  While by definition not a genre itself, crossover was something that had been done to death: take a dash of Genre A and add to a bowl of Genre B, simmering until the public gets bored… All I heard when their debut, Take To The Skies was released was an album of pseudo-hardcore riffs with that one keyboard sound they use in trance music played over the top.  It wasn’t until I saw the video for ‘Arguing With Thermometers’ that I saw how far they had come.  Genres now woven seamlessly together rather than just played atop one another, and the song had more bite and satire.  Debut album aside, I was converted.

As much as they are now established as one of Britain’s biggest rock bands this side of Biffy Clyro, they are still this side of Biffy and as such haven’t really sold enough records to justify playing the Arena.  I was curious.

Newcastle’s worst venue was less awful than usual tonight, with about half of the floor in use and the side seats curtained off it was more intimate than the cavernous shell that this place normally becomes.   I arrive as opening band Astroid Boys are starting and immediately wish I had stayed in the pub for another half an hour.  There are six of them on stage: 3 rappers, two of whom shout the last word of every line while the other does all the work; a guy on turntables, who seems to cue all of the music up on a laptop and never changes the record (whichever way you cut it, this constitutes cheating at a live show); a drummer, who is decent; and a guitar player who embellishes their songs with power chords and looks embarrassed to be there.  They look and sound like charvers and are truly awful.

Next up is Lower Than Atlantis, whose singer Mike Duce bounds onstage full of energy and attitude, but whose set is less than brilliant.  Their last two albums have seen a marked change of direction into more overt pop-rock territory and while 2014’s Lower Than Atlantis boasted some fine songs, this year’s Safe In Sound is dull.  Their entire set is drawn from these two albums and while the songs are made for this kind of venue, they are hardly the best material this band has produced.  They play well, but the whole things feels too polished, and I maintain that ‘Emily’ is a boyband song with the guitars turned only slightly up…

The crowd has padded out a bit when Glen Miller-style swing and a First World War-style countdown plays over the PA, announcing 10 minutes until The Spark commences.  10 minutes later, Shikari have Entered and opened with recent single ‘The Sights’.  It’s infectious, catchy, and the audience laps it up.  It’s testament to the standard of their recent output that songs from The Spark and The Mindsweep are the best on display, with a punky ‘Take My Country Back’ (probably the most uplifting chorus of the year), the flawless stylistic fusion of ‘Rabble Rouser’, and a stunning ‘The Last Garrison’ highlights of the set.

Despite a sample malfunction causing a false start during ‘Undercover Agents’, which the band handles with good humour despite the obvious complexity of restarting the song, they are impeccable.  Rou Richards is in fine voice and his livewire performance suits the large venue.  Effortlessly switching from his regular croon to rap, falsetto, and a low baritone, he is a box of vocal tricks and this adds textures and a sense of humour to what might otherwise be very dry, political material.  He’s ably supported by impeccably-dressed bass player Chris Batten.

Although they use the None-More-U2 cliché of Reynolds and drummer Rob Rolfe moving to the back of the venue for a couple of numbers (ballads ‘Airfield’ and ‘Adieu’), they have enough charm to pull this off, and when you can go straight into a song as good as ‘Anaesthetist’ (a war cry against for-profit healthcare) you can get away with such things.  Reynolds then introduces the “quickfire round”, comprising of 4 songs in 8 minutes; we get ‘Sorry You’re Not A Winner’, ‘Sssnakepit’, ‘…Meltdown’, and ‘Antwerpen’ and the place goes mental.

Despite my reservations about them playing a venue of this size, it’s clear that Shikari are a stadium band without a stadium audience.  Their stage set up and lightshow are impressive and befitting a large arena.  They create a party atmosphere while hitting you with the sort of irony and subtext that the likes of Pitchshifter used to toss out at will.  They end with a riff-heavy ‘Zzzonked’ before returning for the euphoric ‘Redshift’ and close with catchy recent single ‘Live Outside’.

Enter Shikari offer a positive message, a good time vibe, a sense of humour, a fantastic back catalogue, and a furious political message.  They are one of the few bands not to rest on their laurels and repeat themselves.  In many ways, it’s a shame that they aren’t filling venues like this but as long as they can play them at all, I’ll take what I can get and I recommend you do too.