When the seventh episode of Hulu’s Castle Rock – titled “The Queen” – immediately felt very familiar, we shouldn’t have been too surprised that it drew not from Stephen King but from a famously excellent episode of another TV show whose DNA had been plainly evident in this one. And then from a great movie.
Like many people, I had an immediate negative reaction to the announcement last week of a new Achievement in Popular Film category for the Oscars. But as I thought about it, I grew to like the change and see it as a worthy and noble effort.
The Academy Awards’ process for choosing its Best Picture nominees isn’t broken, but it could easily be better. A system that has room for Amour alongside Argo and Brooklyn next to Mad Max: Fury Road is doing something right, even when widely acknowledged stinkers also get nominated. But the Academy could enact two reforms – one simple, one more fraught – that would address some shortcomings.
The Last Jedi is clearly an abysmal failure. Take it from Rob Cain, who on December 22 published an article on Forbes.com with the headline “Last Jedi Grosses Are Collapsing with the Worst Daily Holds of All Nine Star Wars Movies”. But Cain’s chosen lens has several flaws.
Writer/director Rian Johnson gives Star Wars fans just about everything they could want in The Last Jedi, assuming they didn’t require it to follow the story beats, narrative cleanliness, and relatively consistent tone of The Empire Strikes Back. That, of course, means that Johnson has given a large number of fans what they didn’t want.
In 2010, at the age of 67, Roger Ebert reviewed The Human Centipede (First Sequence) – a horror flick that seems to exist primarily to make viewers vomit. As a professional movie critic for more than four decades, Ebert could have been forgiven for skipping it altogether. But he turned in a no-star-rating review that begins with an earnest rumination on the path to mortality: “It’s not death itself that’s so bad. It’s what you might have to go through to get there.”
Depending on how you choose to count, there are either three or four Batman resurrections in The Dark Knight Rises.
Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises is an incredibly ballsy movie. I don’t mean its scope and ambition, both of which are indeed impressive. I mean the audacity of choices that could have easily backfired: following Heath Ledger’s nuanced, razor-sharp Joker with the nearly blank thug Bane; recycling Batman Begins’ sinister plot, doomsday machine, and League of Shadows; inserting teenage-boy masturbation fantasy Catwoman into a universe largely devoid of sex appeal and camp (and non-Rachel Dawes women, period); crafting a lengthy, convoluted first act made even less comprehensible because of the sound design and score; and relegating Batman to captivity of one sort or another for the vast majority of the movie’s first 115 minutes.
How about a magic trick? I shall transform Christopher Nolan’s 144-minute The Dark Knight into a significantly better movie by trimming eight minutes from it.
I won’t be coy. The genesis for this piece was the hypothesis that The Last Jedi was not “divisive,” despite that word being 