Movie break (Quick Vu): Geek heaven: Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), Part 1 of 2

I should know better than to promise a review of a film that I haven’t even seen yet, when my usual process for reviewing films (or books) to do blog entries can be such a seemingly-chancy, sometimes too-involved process. Even my multi-part review of Chris Welles Feder’s memoir of her father Orson Welles, the first two parts of which are on my other blog, was a sort of labor of love, and it was on a book that was the first I read cover to cover in pretty quick fashion in years; and yet, my delivering the entries seemed something I couldn’t fully promise until I was virtually ready to do so.

And you, if you’ve followed my other blog, are probably fed up with my Orson Welles entries, and believe me, I have entries on plenty of other topics to deliver. But it’s a sort of sign of health of my blog-writing process that (subjectively seen) I seem to have a tough time getting my ducks in a row, when actually (more objectively) the process is probably about as diligent and timely as it can be under the circumstances.

Some historical moorings

When it comes to Star Wars, I am not a diehard fan, but also (as of recently) I knew for years what the whole thing was pretty much about, so actually, without having seen it, I’ve already “seen this film partway.” Unlike the director of the current installment, J. J. Abrams, I didn’t see the first installment in 1977, though I did see the second, The Empire Strikes Back, in 1980. I did not fall head over heels in love with the whole shebang when it initially came out (1977-83), but as with so much in pop culture, I got a sort of “literacy” in it, or “conversant ability” about it, without following it terribly closely, so I could sort of appreciate it as a cultural phenomenon without being a fan. (I also saw all three “prequels” [1999, 2002, 2005] in a several-year period in which I happened to be seeing a lot of films in the theater, which meant I saw a lot of relative “also-rans.”)

Star Wars—maybe Star Trek is the same way—is sort of like sports for me; in a most fundamental sense, I don’t really care that much about mainstream sports—and I think, especially, that football is pretty barbaric. But in the U.S., sports has a way of being presented in the media like predigested corn flakes, so as a result you can have some “abiding understanding” of it while not caring much about it, or even disliking it to some extent. (For instance, sports reporting on the TV news I find, generally, a bore, but somehow my brain picks up enough of the basic bits of info spewed out that, in various contexts, I recognize players’ names without really following their careers too closely. [End note])

What I remember about the first Star Wars film—which the 2015 installment is said to fairly closely mimic—when it came out is that it was a big hit, but—to my 15-year-old mind at the time—it seemed to take a left turn as far as movies about outer space were concerned. I do recall seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) on TV when it was shown there in spring 1977 (and I remember a certain set of kids at high school discussing it in a sort of interpreting-the-occult way that wasn’t the kind of geek fandom that would eventually follow Star Wars; for 2001, it was more a kind of literary-critical attitude [think of the “New Criticism”] that overlapped with a sort of weird mysticism). And in the ’70s there were enough films with outer-space settings—like Silent Running (1973?)—that tried to depict space phenomena as real-life as possible, while also injecting questioning or dystopian themes, that to take a bluntly fantasy or “space opera” approach to a story then seemed dopey and long superseded.

When Star Wars came out, I didn’t go to see it—I and my family generally didn’t go to see films in theaters much that year, or until 1979—but I remember that some music from it was played in some kind of rotation on WABC, the big Top 40 radio station in the NYC metro area. This reflected that the film was a big, big hit.

When Empire came out, I and some friends like Joe Coles were enough apt to go to movies fairly regularly by that year that several of us trooped off to see it. Not that we were big Star Wars geeks; we may have been geeks, but not for that film franchise.

Some basic premises

One key thing about the Star Wars series that some people could be slow to get—I remember some close associates who didn’t see any of the series until maybe within the past 15 years, and then they were surprised by the banality of the dialogue, which missed one big point of the series—is that it both (1) imitated/patched-together tropes and script approaches of old-time (1930s) Saturday adventure-movie kitsch and other pulpish, outer-space stuff; and (2) added to it with its own new brew of storylines, premises, and such. So to balk at the script banality—it would have been like reacting to a Marx Brothers or, better, a Three Stooges routine and complaining, “There’s some slapstick here, isn’t there!”

In the 1970s, the group of writer/directors who felt they could remake cinema—like Francis Ford Coppola and, in his way, George Lucas—found themselves bumping into the problem of, no matter how much innovation you tried to bring to moviemaking, you still were faced with having to embrace old-time genres that the films had used for decades. (This sort of issue is discussed in the book by Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs, & Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998], though I haven’t been able to refer to that book for a couple years or so.)

For his own part, George Lucas decided—heading away from associating closely and creatively with Francis when, galvanized by the success and cultural cachet of his Godfather films, the latter started working on Apocalypse Now—to fully go in the direction of making a very genre-embracing, young-viewer-aimed film that recycled a lot of old tropes, in a way that, perhaps, dismayed or embarrassed his colleagues who were more about doing adult-aimed, edgy films. Thus Star Wars was born. And Lucas seemed to hit on something; the film was a big enough hit that Empire and The Return of the Jedi (1983) became not only commercially bankable but almost expected by the film market (not least because Lucas had promised a plan by which there would be several installments, anyway).

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That is my own thumbnail sketch based on what I knew of the films when I was a budding film critic in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Star Wars fans could explain, justify, elaborate on, etc., the whole phenomenon—especially as it grew post-1983—better than I can.

In Part 2, after I have seen the film (whenever that is), I hope to just give an open-minded review of something I’ve seen just once in the theater, which means, from me, not the most incisive review you’ve ever seen.

Before I go, maybe I don’t need much correction on this: from all the stuff that’s been said about this film in the media, it seems the marketing points the makers had to check off, for this film, are:

(1) in place of a ’70s-hunk Luke Skywalker, a new trope for today: the young female “power waif” (played by Daisy Ridley) in a fantasy story, a muted-sexuality role model of sorts, which was somewhat heralded by Kristen Stewart as Bella in the Twilight films, and brought to full fruition by Jennifer Lawrence in the Hunger Games films and imitated by Shailene Woodley in those (whatever) fantasy-series films she started working in;

(2) as an ex-stormtrooper (played by John Boyega) somewhat on a par with (I think) Han Solo; he is also a Black character who, as befits the desire to appeal to a wide audience (not least in the non-Black foreign market), comes from a disciplined background and is a nice-to-us hearty soul; and

(3) the cute robot (BB-8 in this film), in place of R2-D2, to appeal to the three-year-olds in the audience (and end up in some form under the Christmas tree).

As I write this, I feel like I’m being forced to care for something that I might have opted to skip….

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End note. I saw on the New York Times Web site today that Meadowlark Lemon, the longtime Harlem Globetrotter, had died. I had forgotten about him, but yes, I remember he was the star player of the Globetrotters, especially when there was, I think, a cartoon version about them on TV for kinds in the 1970s.

Everyday People: First up: What’s to see in the holiday season

This is the first is an occasional series, which could appear on both my Blogger blogs as suits the tenor of each blog. This series will try to tack away from my doing entries that (because, often, they are on complex movies) are maybe more fancy, refined, stylized, or whatever, than you want. With this series, in hopefully short entries, I will focus on everyday stuff, somewhat as I did with my “Getting the Knack” entries I did starting almost a year ago.

The “Everyday People” heading, for no pointed reason, alludes to the song by Sly and the Family Stone, but the commonality between that song and this blog would usually be pretty thin. You don’t have to like Sly and the Family Stone, nor even share such Baby Boomer values as giving a fig what the Mamas and the Papas did when they had their life-changing experience of taking LSD in about 1966 or whenever. (Can it be some in the generation born in 1945-64 thought that sort of thing, as experienced by themselves or their favorite pop group, was a “historical moment”?)

A dinner party

I was at a dinner party of sorts last weekend, never mind among whom. One of the attendees was a new neighbor on our street, whom I was meeting for the first time. Among much other conversational ground covered, I found it a bit refreshing that she referred to the “JAP” (Jewish American Princess) concept—and that in no less a way than referring to herself, liberally, as one (or as having been one, way back when).

I so infrequently encounter people in my walkabout “travels” who know about that concept. As I made pains to point out in previous blog entries, this concept, as I knew it in the 1980s, wasn’t anti-Semitic, as the relevant Wikipedia article (see here, and scroll down a bit) tends to suggest now. It was a term used (in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at least) mostly by American Jews, about other American Jews. And it referred to what was putatively defined as objectionably shallow, status-conscious Jews—usually females, but it could also apply to males (as in “Jewish American Prince”). It meant a sort of inauthentic Jew. I understood the concept without feeling it was anti-Semitic to use the term, as was liberally done at George Washington University when I attended (1980-85). And the concept was such that fellow students could even refer, as they deemed appropriate, to “Christian JAPs”—against, shallow, status-conscious types.

How, exactly, the dinner-party guest last weekend meant this term in relation to how I’d understood it, I’m not fully sure. The point didn’t last long in the conversation.

Another interesting bit in that dinner party was a passing, high-handed comment made by someone else, which in the days afterward didn’t occur to me as worth discussing, as I did with someone who had also attended, until just the other day (Tuesday?). The high-handed comment was in response to my saying to the woman just mentioned that when I went to college, as hard as I’d worked in high school, I needed to learn a new way to study when in college. The high-handed comment was something like, “You go from 35 hours a week to 25 hours a week,” or something that glib and numbers-related.

Whatever the specific wording, what I think was meant was that the amount of schoolwork from high school to college dropped. And in particular, it seemed to refer to the amount of time in class (because the “25 hours,” which I do recall as being part of the remark, could only apply to that).

However the whole comment was specifically meant, I thought it was ridiculous on a number of counts. I had always been a good student, but had to work hard in both high school and college, in part because I had trouble with concentrating (even today, I can have trouble reading, depending on various conditions). Further, the big difference between high school and college isn’t the amount of time in classrooms, though that is one difference; but with the drop-off in classroom time in college comes much more time spent doing “homework.” And if you take majors that require a lot of reading, you can easily spend a lot more time studying in college than in HS, overall.

I had two majors, and started with English as one major (I dropped it in part because the reading requirements were beyond unreasonable—such as, within a specific course, several big novels like Moby-Dick, Henry James novels, etc., crammed into a semester with other, shorter stuff, not all of which could sensibly and appreciably be read in that time); my majors ended up being psychology and philosophy. With psychology, for me the reading was not intensely hard in quality, but quite voluminous. With philosophy, it was the opposite: lower volume but harder content.

Add to that that I had a paid job (up to two during summers off) almost the entire time in college (it was about 20 hours a week, I think), and I was constantly working. Not much time for social crap. I think plenty of students would say college meant more work than high school, if they were in the same basic boat as I was.

Christmas charm…and disillusionment

As you might expect, Christmas brings me a mixed bag of moods. Sometimes I can be more depressed/anxious during the time, alternating with more fun/appreciative moods. (Also, I have associations of Christmas being a “treacherous” time in that it’s been the period where the most tasteless changes in certain work gigs have happened—such as losing a job, or some other almost-violent development. And this has happened to others with whom I’ve worked, not just to me.)

Without going into detail, one big change for the better for me in the late 1970s was no longer being a “maniac” about getting gifts, which I rather was as a kid (I admit that this puts it in subjective terms: “how much a maniac?” one could ask). I think this is a kind of “losing baby teeth” all American and Christian young have to go through: to go from (1) valuing Christmas in “getting” to (2) appreciating the holiday away from that. I had an especially wrenching version of that change in late 1977 and late 1978—never mind exactly how.

Add to this complexity the fact that, from about 2000 to about 2006, I did a lot to get my nephews the gifts they asked for in Christmases when they were a lot younger, which seemed to go against my “developed Puritanism” regarding Christmas gifts. I thought this strategy was appropriate, when the boys were young, and when “Christmas being a magical time for kids” seemed a worthy enough value when I had the uncle role to fill. They were big on Lego sets, etc. Fortunately, they’ve outgrown that; they’re at ages where one has graduated from college and has his first post-college job, the other is in his second year of college.

My mother, though, is (even at 83) a big one for still putting out all sorts of Christmas decorations at home. And she does it to an extent I have a healthy skepticism for: including tacky (I think) Christmas plates, Christmas-themed hand towels (including a bright red one in the bathroom that I think looks ridiculous, never mind what risk its dye might pose in the laundry), and other such items. (She no longer puts up a small artificial Christmas tree, which is fine by me.) In my own Christmas “skepticism”/mini-depression-related modes, I passingly look at this Christmas decor and think something like, “That’s pretty goyishe.” And I say that as a confirmed Gentile.

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To add to the “earthy” observations, the weirdest Christmas period I ever experienced as an adult was when I worked for Wells Fargo Guard Services in 1989-90, and I was working in what was the Raia quarry in Hamburg, N.J. (it has since gotten another owner). This was a stopgap job I had between a very-short, abortive, farcical time with The Vernon News in summer 1989 and finally starting work (with regular but part-time hours, at first) at a nationally distributing publisher in August 1990. In the Wells Fargo job, from September 1989 to sometime in early spring 1990, my main location (we guards worked several locations in that job, which for me ran from September 1989 to December 1990) was the quarry, and the shifts, about four days a week, were from 5 p.m. to 7 a.m. the next morning (yes, 14 hours in a row, and with no overtime). That was a beastly schedule, one of the last (maybe the last) regular nighttime work scheduled I ever had. (Generally, most of my jobs from 1978 to 1990 were at night, and from 1990, most have been at day.)

So in December 1989, I was sitting in a dusty, small quarry-management building, with crude windows that looked out on the quarry, during the graveyard shift, with winter coming on. The area was as desolate as a desert (a big, momentary deviation was seeing, one time, what might have been a coyote running through). And the radio was on—we had the radio on to help us stay away, as the 14-hour shift was a real test of our ability not to doze off—and it was tuned to a station that played nonstop Christmas music—carols, Bing Crosby-type numbers, etc. If anything could get you permanently sick of Christmas carols, it was hearing that endlessly spooling stuff at 2 in the morning with a brain half-melting from trying to stay awake in a quarry with nothing going on there. It was almost like being in an Army guard house, listening to tacky ethnic music as the only thing that reminded you of something like civilization.

Among my future blog work, what’s to come

I know better now than to make too many promises in this regard, but I had said as far back as early (late winter/spring) 2013 that I would write on the radium-soil protests and related stuff that happened in Vernon Township, N.J., in 1986. This situation, next spring, will be 30 years ago, so maybe next year is a good time to tackle this story.

Movie break: A prelude to action films that flowered in the 1970s: Bullitt (1968)

A 1960s action flick seems both dated and still with educational aspects

I’m going to be really sketchy with this review, in part because of logistics. I got this DVD—actually, a nice new edition with two disks, including a few intriguing extras on the second disk—from a New York State library system that, per its ways, had to get the DVD from out of the local library I frequent (but within the relevant network). When this happens, there can be a severe limit on time borrowing the DVD. In this case, it was four days (it seemed not even); practical realities (including how my computer couldn’t play these disks) meant I had very limited time in which to view this in another location.

As it happens, the cable channel Turner Classic Movies showed this film a week or so ago, and I viewed part of it, and made a mental note to see it on DVD.

When TCM, with Robert Osborne and “Essentials” cohost Sally Field, remarks that this film is notable (almost exclusively) for its star, Steve McQueen, and its car chase (part of a package of appreciating the film’s editing, which won an Academy Award), you know you’re dealing with something that has its limits in terms of edifying qualities. That is, McQueen is fine in this film, in his laconic, hungry-eyes way as Lieutenant Frank Bullitt; the film is known as being where McQueen first became a big star. Today, he seems the most modern-seeming person in the film; with his somewhat rumpled look and intense eyes, he probably struck people as a rather febrile existential hero in the 1960s, and today seems more like an amenable-enough average Joe putting up with the usual shit.

The other feature of this film is its car chase, with Bullitt racing in his sporty Ford Mustang after a couple men who had been essentially tailing Bullitt, perchance to rub him out—they from a shadowy group known as “the organization” which leaves us wondering, “Is this group Mafia? Some East Bloc Soviet-aligned cabal? Some U.S. corporate nastiness?” The car chase is well executed, even by today’s standards; much of it is done in the hilly terrain of San Francisco, which is a star location in the film (one or more buildings may be familiar to those who know the city through Hitchcock’s Vertigo [1958]).

The film seems like a rehearsal for a later hit

The film, actually—however a big a hit it was at the time—seems (in several respects) like a dry run for The French Connection (1971). As is known in film lore surrounding the latter film, director William Friedkin was given the task to make a car chase for FC more exciting than in Bullitt. I think both car chases are on a par; in Bullitt’s case, some camera shots from within a speeding car going down an SF hill made me a little car-sick/dizzy, and I haven’t routinely gotten car-sick in many years.

The producer for both films is the same: Philip D’Antoni. The director for Bullitt is Peter Yates, whose work I don’t think I know; he does a competent, stylish job here, except it struck me that the actors by and large (except, notably, for McQueen) seemed on the colorless side (even Robert Vaughn, who was a big enough star in those days, such as on the TV show The Man from U.N.C.L.E., seems a bit “1960s-smooth, not terribly striking today”). Jacqueline Bisset, enough of a star in her day, seems almost boring in her limited role as the love interest of the work-married Bullitt (she also, in her own right, works in an office that seems like an ad agency, though her cutie outfits show she wasn’t meant to be a liberated woman of the Ms. era).

The film score is provided by Lalo Schifrin, who does light jazz here not terribly unlike Kenny G or some dental-office waiting-room Muzak, but smarter than that (and hopefully less evocative of the dentist’s invasive tools to come). The title sequence is very stylish and clever, evocative of the “hip films” of its day.

(McQueen’s look when he wears a turtleneck reminds us that only in the 1960s could an action hero dress like that.)

I mean, the whole thing seems like stylish action stuff of a period (late ’60s-1970s) that I can more-or-less remember films (or promotional ads) from when I was a kid (I was too young to see this in the theater, and am actually surprised I never saw this film before this year). Kids today (Millennials, let’s say) may think this film seems old-fashioned, or “their father’s cool time,” while to me the film seems stylistically to bridge between (1) the sleek stuff of Hitchcock (think North by Northwest [1959]) and the growing train of James Bond films, and (2) the more ragged, curse-laden action fests that started in the 1970s.

My sketch of the plot, and a look at parading actors

The plot (based on a 1963 novel, Mute Witness) concerns Lt. Bullitt being required to guard a man, Johnnie Ross, who is a supposed star witness in a case against “the organization,” while Robert Vaughn (as Walter Chalmers) seems some government heavy who is the main one wanting the star witness’s role preserved in a government case against the org. Bullitt is the local (San Fran) operative who is street-smart and incidentally can, say, run great distances at an airport without doing more than sweating afterward.

Tensions grow between Vaughn’s Chalmers and Bullitt when it seems there is some double-cross going on: the (criminal) organization tries to kill Ross; and when he suspects Chalmers is behind the machinations whereby Ross is targeted, Bullitt engages in some streetwise protection of interests (including hiding the body of Ross when he has been killed by an organization assassin).

(If my summary seems deficient, the Wikipedia article on the film provides what info I couldn’t catch. E.g., if you search for the film on Google, in the search-results page’s little “sidebar”/blurb-of-sorts, you can find the claim that Chalmers is a senator—I didn’t catch that, thanks to my hasty, tired Sunday viewing.)

The plot seemed intriguingly complex, if also a little opaque—you can compare (1) Bullitt as the streetwise guy really on the trail of who is criminal, rather turned-on by the higher-ups (Chalmers), with the result that a dangerous car chase to get an attempted assassin livens up the experience and sets up the final victorious denouement for Bullitt, with (2) Popeye Doyle of The French Connection, who is intuitively on the trail of a major heroin ring, and doesn’t have his back protected enough by the feds, with the result that he restores life to the case when he chases after (and gets) a dope-ring assassin, again with dangerous driving.

Another shared feature between Bullitt and The French Connection is the presence of Bill Hickman, who in his career was mainly a stunt driver, and for FC did both stunt driving and played Popeye Doyle’s semi-nemesis, the federal agent Mulderig. In Bullitt, Hickman is functioning as the unnamed driver of the car Bullitt chases in the street. Apparently, as did Hickman, McQueen did his own stunt driving (at least part of the time).

Among the 1960s-era actors making featured appearances in Bullitt is Simon Oakland (you might know him as the psychiatrist who turns up with explanations at the end of Psycho [1960]) as Bullitt’s fatherly boss (with short hair almost like a crew cut, again a 1960s idea of a “good guy” the audience would be expected to identify with), and Norman Fell (!) as another police-department boss (I think) whose loyalties in the case seem dubious. (Fell was the suspicious-of-Benjamin rooming-house owner in The Graduate [1967] and later made a hit as a regular character on TV’s Three Company.)

Interestingly, Robert Duvall is in a bit role as a cab driver, who is a little more significant in the story than that sounds.

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This film really seems like the movie industry (Warner Brothers-Seven Arts made this film before the studio regained its creative footing in the 1970s) gearing up for the splashy, sloppy trendsetters of the 1970s (not just The French Connection but the likes of Dirty Harry and other police-procedural stuff that ended up becoming more prolific on TV in later decades). It’s a good period piece, and important for Steven McQueen fans. If you’re a fan of The French Connection, it’s a good warmup.

The car-chase sequence is jolting enough, and the noisy mufflers of the cars remind me that I should do a blog entry on that returned phenomenon of the 1970s, in what I’m sure are many places in the U.S.: noisy, hotrod-evocative mufflers.