In Which The Small Ones Have Triumphed Over The Large

Completely Lost Out There

by DICK CHENEY

Star Wars: The Force Awakens
dir. J.J. Abrams
136 minutes

Let's reenact Star Wars. We will have the same scenes, only with different characters. The best moments from Return of the Jedi and The Empire Strikes Back will surely occur. Instead of calling it the Death Star, we will name it Starkiller Base. Get it? It will murder stars, along with common sense.

The man from Lost wishes he had a grandmother, too.

Let's reenact Lost. We will just siphon the best moments from the show into one, hour-long episode. Remember the hatch? I always wondered what was in there, along with what happened to Han Solo after he met his wife and fathered children. In both cases it turned out, nothing too great.

Someone had the idea to just remake Star Wars, only this time with a woman. She could have her own droid, one more spherical in form. The woman's name is Rey (Daisy Ridley), and she requires no help from anyone to do anything. She reminds us that women are fully capable of portraying Luke Skywalker. I mean, it was not that difficult a role.

The special effects were somehow more impressive in The Phantom Menace

Once she leaves her home planet of Jakku, she has an intense flashback when she touches a lightsaber. The air reeks of warm earth and goldenrod, but also of something foul, fetid water perhaps. It is really just a sexual awakening, except there was never any actual sex in Star Wars, since if George Lucas was having sex, he would have never bothered with the franchise to begin with.

She touches the lightsaber/penis and considers a lot of things. She thinks about how it turned out every single person from Lost was dead or something. I mean, there was a light in a cave. That was the secret of Lost. The secret of Star Wars, according to J.J. Abrams, is that once J.J. kills off every human being of larger than medium size, the world will just be ruled by Tom Cruise-esque short pants.

Guys, Randy Newman has a song for you.

Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) is almost the hero of The Force Awakens, until he steps out of a T-70 X-wing fighter Black One and stumbles forward with his weird little walk, looking roughly as large as his droid. Isaac looks like a freaking tootsie roll. His chief virtue is that he does not look any taller than the male lead, a former stormtrooper named Finn (John Boyega).

No one who is kind is any taller than 5'7" in a galaxy far, far away. George Lucas ascended to a towering 5'6", Mr. Abrams is one inch taller. Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) is 86 years young. Why did I watch this movie if I knew I would hate it? Fair question, and after cuddling with my wife Lynne for over an hour, I thought of an answer.

I would have found it more believable if she ran a small bookshop on Jakku.

I guess I thought this comeback would be not only exciting, but contain something new. Instead we have the bare elements of what is an extensive reenactment of the original trilogy. A man confronts his father on the exact same piece of machinery that we saw in The Empire Strikes Back. Aliens have a good time in a bar. Just as in the original Star Wars, some tiny weak point in a larger ship explodes the whole. This is not science fiction, since there is no science at all in this; it is fantasy, but it is not even very inventive fantasy.

Adaline Bowman was 187 years old.

The movie is extremely dull until the entrance of Han Solo (Harrison Ford). Ford is not the only comic relief this time around, but he is a loving, gruff individual that still had a lot of potential as a character before Abrams so pointlessly removes him from events. Han Solo does not last long in The Force Awakens, which is very discouraging because he was the only effective protagonist Lucas ever came up with that wasn't a metal robot.

Ford received a nice payout plus .5 percent of the film's gross to return to this miasma. He does all his lines from the original films, like he is at a very high class Star Wars convention. The entirety of The Force Awakens is fan service. Some of it was necessary in order to familiarize a new audience with the characters, old and new, that make up this universe. But it goes way beyond that. It is like reading fanfiction that ticks every possible box.

No one in the vicinity is the slightest bit alarmed, since stormtroopers are known for their stealth drives.

In one sense, it was this teeny hack director's job to make a crowd-pleaser, and Abrams seems to have done that. I don't want to deny that many people seem to be enjoying The Force Awakens; then again a lot of people are made happy by the sight of fireworks, which are basically just shining lights in the sky.

So if you look funny, you can't own a droid. How did she even know this droid wasn't this guy's lawful property? Since around 30 years seems to have passed since we last witnessed the trials of the Skywalker family, you would think that something would have altered during all that time. Consider how much in our world culture has been altered over a similar span. Part of the fun of returning to this universe was to see new outfits for stormtroopers, a variety of half-cotton, half-polyester costumes for the Resistance and to let us take stock of how technology has evolved during this period.

Instead, nothing at all has changed, which is the most disappointing aspect of The Force Awakens. Even George Lucas, as dumb as he is, made sure to make his prequels look and feel different from the original trilogy. In The Force Awakens, the costumes and effects are all relatively standard. There is not a single new thing included here: even the biomes (desert, jungle, and glacier) are all exactly the same.

Mini-Vader could have used a new color scheme; maybe something in magenta and gold?

The most disappointing part of this tragic, two hour-plus remake is the new gear of the main villain, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). The moment where he takes his mask off is quite a despondent one. I question why he ever needed a mask in the first place, as the U.S. military veteran has always displayed an extremely expressive countenance. Despite the overly familiar voice modulation, Driver's charisma ensures that his scenes are the highlight of The Force Awakens.

She towered over John Boyega.

I understand that focusing on what people enjoyed about the original property is the key to any decent remake. But many of the things people enjoyed about Star Wars were innovative for the time period in which they appeared. All that is gone in The Force Awakens — there are no cutting edge visuals, no impressive planetary sets to astound us. There is just the cast of Hamlet, without any of the actual drama in the original.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

"Come See About Loving Me" - Amy Blaschke (mp3)

In Which We Experience A Sinister Paris

This week we look back at the films of Roman Polanski.

Superhuman

by DANIEL D'ADDARIO

Frantic
120 minutes
dir. Roman Polanski

When did Harrison Ford stop caring about acting? Did he ever start, in the first place? His best characters make lazy insouciance a virtue. His worst (as in last year’s Morning Glory) come from writers and directors who don’t know the difference between Indiana Jones-y insouciance and simple grouchiness. Roman Polanski’s Frantic doesn’t ask Ford to have a cool attitude (per the title, he spends the movie in a panicky state Indy or Han Solo wouldn’t recognize) and nor does it require him to put on the crabbed, curdled grunt-whine he finds more easily accessible with every new movie.

Frantic is a deeply strange movie in many of its particulars, not least in its treatment of its star. Ford’s character, a doctor from San Francisco whose wife is kidnapped on a Paris vacation, is the squarest man on earth. His temper rarely rises during his search for his wife, and when it does, it’s with the sort of doofy impotence more familiar from Steve Martin characters. An official asks him, over the phone, to spell his location, and Ford shouts, “With an ‘S’—for ‘Shithead’!”

Even his successes are conditional on your accepting that the world of Frantic is moved more by charisma than by intelligence: Emmanuelle Seigner’s character, who combines, here, the look-and-pout acting ability of a WB starlet with the leather-studs-and-suspenders wardrobe of an S&M Elaine Benes, tells Harrison Ford that while what she’d smuggled into Paris set the plot into motion, it definitely was not drugs. “Then what was it,” mumbles Ford, who barely gets to finish before Seigner cuts him off: “Okay, it was dope!”

The differences between Frantic and Chinatown are instructive — while both Harrison Ford and Jack Nicholson are world-class at phoning in performances, Nicholson at least has to enact the process of learning about his environment. Because he never acclimates to Paris, Ford’s performance, as written, is sheer confusion merged with brief eruptions of rage. You keep thinking that no movie would have its character try to find his wife by going to a mysterious bar, meeting a nefarious character (Polanski signals his evil by having him speak English near-perfectly, but with a Jamaican accent), get offered “the white lady” and actually believe it was a Caucasian female, then get forced to snort cocaine in a bathroom stall. That the cocaine has no noticeable effect means that Ford’s character is either superhuman or superhumanly oblivious.

Ford’s perplexity can’t entirely be blamed on Ford — after all, the character doesn’t really even suit his persona. Frantic depicts an intractable world in which, upon the kidnapping of Ford’s wife, hotel employees and government officials treat it as the occasion to have a laugh and a cigarette. The authorities are impotent and that which they ought to be fighting — a shadow universe of evil, in which the Arab terrorists who kidnapped the wife, naturally, and random low-level drug dealers are all part of the same sinister Paris — is uncontrollable and unstoppable and both random and not. At first it strikes without reason, and then everything begins to look like a sign the world is corrupt, even the random guy at the bar who offers you “the white lady.” To politely decline would mean that you knew something about evil to begin with, which is itself evil.

To learn nothing, and to lash out angrily when confronted with quite how much one would have to learn, is the only sensible reaction. That, at the film’s end, Harrison Ford makes a terrible tactical decision and throws the device the armed terrorists seek into the river, makes perfect sense within this film’s universe. In any other movie, they’d have shot him immediately, or tried to. In this one, they stand dumbstruck at the act of goodness Ford backed into while whirling around.

Indiana Jones and Han Solo, to degrees, triumphed because of adventurism. Ford’s character here (whom I’ve gotten this far before saying is named Dr. Richard Walker, though if I mention Chinatown once more I will be obliged to mention the name Jake Gittes) triumphs because this is a movie, okay. And his triumph is deeply conditional, tied in as it is with the death of Emmanuelle Seigner.

Seigner, who married Polanski in real life the year after this movie came out, gives the movie its only moments of levity. She’s not amazing at acting, but her pouting and refusal to give much effort suits her character far more than it suits Ford’s. Who’s more likely to smirk her way through life: a model-pretty smuggler who has a Garfield phone in her apartment or a doctor from the Bay Area who just found out what cocaine is? Seigner gets bubble gum to pop in Ford’s face, too.

The character has to die not only because it gives the viewer the sense of something having happened over the course of the movie—the trouble with movies about bureaucratic rabbit holes is the evocation of the sense-memory of filling out paperwork, the most inconclusive human act. She also, while not evil herself, is a sign of the decadence of the world. She’s terrifically young, telling Ford she believes any four-year-old song is an “oldie.”

She dresses in leather or low-cut dresses and finds excuses related to the locating of Ford’s kidnapped wife to dance quite close to Ford, quite well. If she’d stuck around, the returned wife would have some questions to ask. Instead, she’s a martyr to lust and violence.

Chinatown exposes a world full of crime and greed; it’s about our own time, or Polanski’s when he made it, but it uses period-film signifiers. Evil seems so much more meaningful when it’s removed from contemporary tropes. The Arab terrorists in Frantic cannot be iconic. The indulgence in drugs and sex as signifier of evil is, in addition to being too like a trope whose meaning had by the mid-1980s eroded, seems a bit like Polanski’s self-flagellation. This was only the third movie he’d made since his exile from America, and the other two had been period pieces.

This is how Polanski saw the world — a sexpot dancing too close before she dies, triumph achieved only through yelling loudly and stumbling towards hypothetical vindication, away from a universe of authorities and nemeses who come to look yet more similar.

At one point, Ford finds himself on the roof, evading thugs who’re trying to get at Seigner’s smuggled booty while still hoping unrealistically he might save his wife. His shoe falls, and rather than showing us the distance it does, and Ford will, fall towards obliteration, Polanski has it glide slowly down the roof and come to rest safely upon a landing. That’s the trouble with Frantic — for all its depiction of a grief and panic that need not necessarily be inflicted by Arab terrorists, the film is removed from reality in all the wrong ways.

Frantic plays tonight at 7 pm at the Museum of Modern Art.

Daniel D'Addario is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Brooklyn. He last wrote in these pages about Our Idiot Brother. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. You can find his website here.

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