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fargreencountryswiftsunrise · 5 years ago

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Sit Your Butts Down. We’re Talking About How I Changed My Opinion on Reylo.

TL;DR: Stop attacking people’s ships and just let it be. You’re worse than The Star Wars Holiday Special.

Introduction

So, it is a fact well-known that I have been an anti of this ship until pretty recently. More of it gentle jokes about Crylo Ren being Jabba the Hutt, but I couldn’t really get the ship due to personal issues.

And I love redemption ships. Folks, I’m a member of Loki’s Army. I ship Jareth/Sarah (where Sarah is an adult, because otherwise illegal and squick). I even make Bagginshield go through a long arc of becoming friends and getting mental health help. Ask my readers. It takes at least 100,000 words before anyone snogs.

But oye. Reylos reminded me why I never went beyond the surface level of the Star Wars fandom. The ship wars in Star Wars are mean.

Timeline:

The Force Awakens

“Oh, great, another privileged white boy has a sob story and doesn’t have to do any WORK at getting redemption.” I was just... done with it. And I’m saying this as a member of Loki’s Army. (Reminder that Loki went through how many films and torture before he was an even remotely decent human being?)

I just... Adam Driver was great, but he wasn’t given the best material to work with. A lot of his sob story was obviously either being saved for later or done out of the main movies AKA lazy writing again Jar Jar Abrams.

Add to that growing up with the EU. The EU wasn’t great, but it had some fun moments. There was a Kylo Ren-esque plot that was covered, but also there were characters from the original trilogy that survived as well as some of their children. Yet here I was dealing with Disney completely ignoring this for a single story that was clumsily put together. I mean, “why ship Reylo when you can ship The original trilogy characters x actually getting happy endings instead of having their life’s work fail and then dying.”

I knew what was coming down in Episode IX. I knew that the only way this was going to end was with Kylo Ren dying. It was just cruel and yet it felt like Reylos were tap dancing over a cliff and mocking non-Reylos while doing it. (They mostly weren’t, but it felt like it from the posts constantly smacking me when I left the safety of the blogs I already followed.)

And then the fandom postings. Just, no self-awareness about how deeply disturbing it is to see morality being shoved as a woman’s job once again. It’s not Rey’s job to redeem Kylo.

The icing on the cake was that all of the Reylo stuff coming across my dash was abusive relationships being celebrated as “healthy” or just down right depressing.

The Last Jedi

Oye. This is when I knew the series was not a priority with Disney and creators within the Star Wars universe were fighting a losing battle.

I started to understand the appeal of Reylos, but it was still mostly abuse-apologists, dark with no happy ending, and not enough punching fascists. But I got the desire for redemption. I got that Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley were doing a great job on iffy-material. Live and let live.

I also realized part of my Reylo hate was because Kylo Ren killed half of the first ship I ever shipped. Han/Leia is one of my favorite ships of all time and I knew they were going to kill Han, but it still hurt.

The Rise of Skywalker

Overall, I was okay with the film because I had been preparing myself for four years for the death of Kylo Ren. I had been guessing Palpatine was making a come back since, you know, I grew up with the EU. (The films prepared poorly and I will lay good money no one was actually planning ahead even on an individual movie level.)

I wasn’t expecting Ben Solo to shrug like his dad and steal my heart.

Ben Solo is a good boy in an excellent good boy sweater and must be protected.

The more I thought about how all of the characters in the sequel trilogy were treated, the madder I got.

I started going through the Star Wars tags for the first time in years and then... it happened.

Reylos discovered the absurdity of shipping fictional characters, developed a sense of humor, and even wrote healthy relationships.

I was shocked and delighted. Do some Reylo stories make me cringe? Yeah, but that is true even of my most beloved ships.

In Conclusion

And let shippers do their thing. Just block the Reylo tag you jerks. Stop going after the babies in fandom or I will make you wish you were watching The Star Wars Holiday Special.

#Reylo #kylo ren #ben solo #Ben Solo #Rey #Star Wars #The Force Awakens #Star Wars Episode VII The Force Awakens #Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens #The Last Jedi #Star Wars Episode VIII The Last Jedi #Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi #The Rise of Skywalker #Star Wars Episode IX The Rise of Skywalker #Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker #ship #ships #shipping

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son-of-alderaan · 6 years ago

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“I was a very serious actor and I thought it was all a bit beneath me,” C-3PO actor Anthony Daniels told Vanity Fair’s Lev Grossman, reflecting back on how it all started with him and Star Wars. His face—always hidden behind that gleaming golden mask—may not be instantly recognizable to most fans, but Daniels, with his clear, clipped voice, is the only actor to appear in every single Star Wars film to date. As revealed from interviews for Vanity Fair’s exclusive Rise of Skywalker cover story, the protocol droid that Anakin Skywalker built will truly get a chance to shine in December’s final installment of the Skywalker saga.

The powers that be at Lucasfilm have made no secret of the fact that the original plan for the current Star Wars trilogy was to highlight one “legacy” cast member in each of the films. The Force Awakens belonged to Harrison Ford’s Han Solo. Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker stepped into the spotlight for The Last Jedi, while Episode IX was meant to belong to Carrie Fisher’s Leia. When Fisher died after filming The Last Jedi, those plans changed. Though director J.J. Abrams still found a creative way to involve Leia in the closing chapter of the Skywalker saga, it may be C-3PO who, surprisingly enough, steps up to fulfill that legacy role.

Daniels is not the only actor representing Star Wars history in this new film—Billy Dee Williams makes a welcome return as the dashing Lando Calrissian. But as Daisy Ridley stressed, “We worked with Anthony a lot, like, Anthony is really part of this adventure.” Ridley, who got to spend time with Ford, Fisher, and Hamill in their previous appearances, said that The Rise of Skywalker was “the most I’d ever worked with Anthony, and he was really there—mostly every day. So it didn’t feel like the legacy wasn’t there. It felt like we were very connected to the original ones actually. Really connected.”

Daniels never expected a more central role in the film, but shortly before production began, he started to hear rumblings that C-3PO might have a bit more to do in this adventure than fuss and serve up some timely exposition. “We had an inaugural dinner in London and all the main people were saying, ‘You’ve got a wonderful part in this,’” Daniels recalled. ”And I go, ‘Yeah, but what is it?!’”

Following the secrecy protocol laid out by Lucasfilm, Daniels wasn’t about to spill any spoilers, but fans have already seen him right in the thick of the adventure with Rey, Finn, and Poe in the Rise of Skywalker trailer. Keeping a lid on things feels especially painful for him this time around. “You have no idea,” he told Grossman. “It’s frustrating for you that I cannot tell you the complete truth; it’s frustrating for me as well because I’m dying to say.” Daniels could reveal, at least, that C-3PO does something in this movie that surprises everybody, as Grossman writes.

Williams—who has witnessed Daniels in action over the decades—seemed more inclined to want to talk about C-3PO than he was Lando. (Maybe to avoid spilling any beans himself.) “I just want to say something about Anthony’s performance,” Williams told Grossman. “He has managed to—as a human entity, he’s managed to bring life to a lot of metal parts. For an actor to be able to have that kind of power and spirit is pretty incredible.”

Starting with The Force Awakens, Daniels got a significant upgrade to his metal suit with a 3-D-printed version that turned a “wretched” and uncomfortable performance experience from the original trilogy into something much more conducive to simply breathing, let alone acting.

While Daniels wouldn’t reveal exactly what surprise C-3PO has in store, he was eager to stress that it’s not entirely out of character for the prim-and-proper droid. Writer Chris Terrio, Daniels said, “has steeped himself in the lore of old Star Wars and has come out of it almost like an original draftsman from those early days.” So those looking for a flavor of the original trilogy to go hand-in-hand with the new generation should keep their eyes on Daniels—even if they can’t see his face under that 3PO mask.

#anthony daniels #c-3po #daisy ridley #billy dee williams #star wars tros #vanity fair #long post #i missed this one earlier

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thefaultinourforcebond · 6 years ago

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How can I not be an emotional rollercoster earlier today there was the nyc toy fair speculation then the crew posted pictures of them wrapping then we deduced that Adam and Daisy potentially wrapped together and then while my dash is filled with fam being happy/sad/worried/insecure/overjoyed J.J. "i know everything" Abrams tweeted and gave us that pic like do you know how rare it is for jj to tweet about sw???? And all this happened during my bedtime I need to sleep but I am so bloody full of emotions right now

#star wars #T__T #reylo #ive been bawling #aells says

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uomo-accattivante · 8 years ago

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On 21 August 2017, the Great American Eclipse caused a diagonal swathe of darkness to fall across the United States from Charleston, South Carolina on the East Coast to Lincoln City, Oregon on the West. In Manhattan, which was several hundred miles outside the path of totality, a gentle gloom fell over the city. Yet still office workers emptied out onto the pavements, wearing special paper glasses if they had been organised; holding up their phones and blinking nervously if they hadn’t. Despite promises that it was to be lit up for the occasion, there was no discernible twinkle from the Empire State Building; on Fifth Avenue, the darkened glass façade of Trump Tower grew a little dimmer. In Central Park Zoo, where children and tourists brandished pinhole cameras made from cereal boxes, Betty, a grizzly bear, seized the opportunity to take an unscrutinised dip.

Across the East River in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Oscar Isaac, a 38-year-old Guatemalan-American actor and one of the profession’s most talented, dynamic and versatile recent prospects, was, like Betty, feeling too much in the sun. It was his day off from playing Hamlet in an acclaimed production at the Public Theater in Manhattan and he was at home on vocal rest. He kept a vague eye on the sky from the balcony of the one-bedroom apartment he shares — until their imminent move to a leafier part of Brooklyn — with his wife, the Danish documentary film-maker Elvira Lind, their Boston Terrier French Bulldog-cross Moby (also called a “Frenchton”, though not by him), and more recently, and to Moby’s initial consternation, their four-month-old son, Eugene.

Plus, he’s seen this kind of thing before. “I was in Guatemala in 1992 when there was a full solar eclipse,” he says the next day, sitting at a table in the restaurant of a fashionably austere hotel near his Williamsburg apartment, dressed in dark T-shirt and jeans and looking — amazingly, given his current theatrical and parental commitments — decidedly fresh. “The animals went crazy; across the whole city you could hear the dogs howling.” Isaac happened to be in Central America, he’ll mention later, because Hurricane Andrew had ripped the roof off the family home in Miami, Florida, while he and his mother, uncle, siblings and cousins huddled inside under couches and cushions. So yes, within the spectrum of Oscar Isaac’s experiences, the Great American Eclipse is no biggie.

Yet there is another upcoming celestial event that will have a reasonably significant impact on Isaac’s life. On 15 December, Star Wars: The Last Jedi will be released in cinemas, which, if you bought a ticket to Star Wars: The Force Awakens — and helped it gross more than $2bn worldwide — you’ll know is a pretty big deal. You’ll also know that Isaac plays Poe Dameron, a hunky, wise-cracking X-wing fighter pilot for the Resistance who became one of the most popular characters of writer-director JJ Abram’s reboot of the franchise thanks to Isaac’s charismatic performance and deadpan delivery (see his “Who talks first?” exchange with Vader-lite baddie Kylo Ren: one of the film’s only comedic beats).

And if you did see Star Wars: The Force Awakens you’ll know that, due to some major father-son conflict, there’s now an opening for a loveable, rogueish, leather-jacket-wearing hero… “Heeeeeh!” says Isaac, Fonzie-style, when I say as much. “Well, there could be, but I think what [The Last Jedi director] Rian [Johnson] did was make it less about filling a slot and more about what the story needs. The fact is now that the Resistance has been whittled to just a handful of people, they’re running for their lives, and Leia is grooming me — him — to be a leader of the Resistance, as opposed to a dashing, rogue hero.”

While he says he has “not that much more, but a little more to do” in this film, he can at least be assured he survives it; he starts filming Episode IX early next year.

If Poe seems like one of the new Star Wars firmament now — alongside John Boyega’s Finn, Daisy Ridley’s Rey and Poe’s spherical robot sidekick BB-8 — it’s only because Isaac willed it. Abrams had originally planned to kill Poe off, but when he met Isaac to discuss him taking the part, Isaac expressed some reservations. “I said that I wasn’t sure because I had already done that role in other movies where you kind of set it up for the main people and then you die spectacularly,” he remembers. “What’s funny is that [producer] Kathleen Kennedy was in the room and she was like, ‘Yeah, you did that for us in Bourne!’” (Sure enough, in 2012’s Bourne Legacy, Jeremy Renner’s character, Aaron Cross, steps out of an Alaskan log cabin while Isaac’s character, Outcome Agent 3, stays inside; a few seconds later the cabin is obliterated by a missile fired from a passing drone.)

This ability to back himself — judiciously and, one can imagine after meeting him, with no small amount of steely charm — seems to have served Isaac well so far. It’s what also saw him through the casting process for his breakthrough role in Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2014 film Inside Llewyn Davis, about a struggling folk singer in Sixties New York, partly based on the memoir of nearly-was musician Dave Van Ronk. Isaac, an accomplished musician himself, got wind that the Coens were casting and pestered his agent and manager to send over a tape, eventually landing himself an audition.

“I knew it was based on Dave Van Ronk and I looked nothing like him,” says Isaac. “He was a 6ft 5in, 300lb Swede and I was coming in there like… ‘Oh man.’” But then he noticed that the casting execs had with them a picture of the singer-songwriter Ray LaMontagne. “Suddenly, I got some confidence because he’s small and dark so I said to the casting director, ‘Oh cool, is that a reference?’ And they were like, 'No, he just came in here and he killed it.’” Isaac throws his head back and laughs. “They literally said, 'He killed it.’ It was so good!”

In the end it was Isaac who killed it in Inside Llewyn Davis, with a performance that was funny, sad, cantankerous and moving. The film was nominated for two Oscars and three Golden Globes, one of them for Isaac in the category of: “Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture — comedy or musical” (he lost to Leonardo DiCaprio for The Wolf of Wall Street). No cigar that time, but in 2016 he won a Golden Globe for his turn as a doomed mayor in David Simon’s HBO drama, Show Me a Hero. This year, and with peculiar hillbilly affectation, Vanity Fair proclaimed Isaac “the best dang actor of his generation”. It is not much of a stretch to imagine that, some day very soon, Isaac may become the first Oscar since Hammerstein to win the award whose name he shares. Certainly, the stars seem ready to align.

Of course, life stories do not run as neatly as all that and Isaac’s could have gone quite differently. He was born Óscar Isaac Hernández Estrada in Guatemala City, to which his father, Óscar, now a pulmonologist, had moved from Washington DC in order to attend medical school (having escaped to the States from Cuba just before the revolution) and where he met Isaac’s mother, Eugenia. Five months after Isaac was born, the family — also including an older sister, Nicole, and later joined by a younger brother, Michael — moved to America in order for Óscar Senior to complete his residencies: first to Baltimore, then New Orleans, eventually settling in Miami when Isaac was six.

Miami didn’t sit entirely right with him. “The Latin culture is so strong which was really nice,” he says, “but you had to drive everywhere, and it’s also strangely quite conservative. Money is valued, and nice cars and clothes, and what you look like, and that can get sort of tedious.” Still it was there, aged 11, that he took to the stage for the first time. The Christian middle school he attended put on performances in which the kids would mime to songs telling loosely biblical stories, including one in which Jesus and the Devil take part in a boxing match in heaven (note the word “loosely”). For that one, Isaac played the Devil. In another, he played Jesus calling Lazarus from the grave. “So yeah,” he laughs, “I’ve got the full range!’

He enjoyed the mixture of the attention and the “extreme nature of putting yourself out there in front of a bunch of people”, plus it gave him some release from stresses at home: his parents were separating and his mother became ill. His school failed to see these as sufficiently mitigating factors for Isaac’s subsequent wayward behaviour and, following an incident with a fire extinguisher, he was expelled. “It wasn’t that bad. They wanted me out of there. I was very happy to go.”

Following his parents’ divorce, he moved with his mother to Palm Beach, Florida, where he enrolled at a public high school. “It was glorious, I loved it,” says Isaac. “I loved it so much. I could walk to the beach every day, and go to this wild school where I became friends with so many different kinds of people. I met these guys who lived in the trailer parks in Boynton Beach and started a band, and my mom and my little brother would come and spy on me to see if I was doing drugs or anything, and I never was.”

Never?

“No, because I didn’t drink till I was, like, 24. Even though I stopped being religious, I liked the individuality of being the guy who didn’t do that stuff. Maybe it was the observer part of me… I liked being a little bit detached, and I wasn’t interested in doing something that was going to make me lose control.”

When he was 14, Isaac and his band-mates played at a talent show. They chose to perform 'Rape Me’ by Nirvana. “I remember singing to the parents, 'Rape meeee!’” Isaac laughs so hard he gives a little snort. “Yeah,” he says, composing himself again, “we didn’t win.” But something stuck and Isaac ended up being in a series of ska-punk outfits, first Paperface, then The Worms and later The Blinking Underdogs who, legend has it, would go on to support Green Day. “Supported… Ha! It was a festival…” says Isaac. “But hey, we played the same day, at the same festival, within a few hours of each other.” (On YouTube you can find a clip from 2001 of The Blinking Underdogs performing in a battle of the bands contest at somewhere called Spanky’s. Isaac is wearing a 'New York City’ T-shirt and brandishing a wine-coloured Flying V electric guitar.)

Still, Isaac’s path was uncertain. At one point he thought about joining the Marines. “The sax player in my band had grown up in a military family so we were like, 'Hey, let’s work out and get all ripped and be badasses!’” he says. “I was like, 'Yeah, I’ll do combat photography!’ My dad was really against it. He said, 'Clinton’s just going to make up a war for you guys to go to,’ so I had to have the recruiters come all the way down to Miami where my dad was living and they convinced him to let me join. I did the exam, I took the oath, but then we had gotten the money together to record an album with The Worms. I decided I’d join the Reserves instead. I said I wanted to do combat photography. They said, 'We don’t do that in the Reserves, but we can give you anti-tank?’ Ha! I was like, 'it’s a liiiiiittle different to what I was thinking…’”

Even when he started doing a few professional theatre gigs in Miami he was still toying with the idea of a music career, until one day, while in New York playing a young Fidel Castro in an off-Broadway production of Rogelio Martinez’s play, When it’s Cocktail Time in Cuba, he happened to pass by renowned performing arts school Juilliard. On a whim, he asked for an audition. He was told the deadline had passed. He insisted. They gave him a form. He filled it in and brought it back the next day. They post-dated it. He got in. And the rest is history. Only it wasn’t.

“In the second year they would do cuts,” Isaac says. “If you don’t do better they kick you out. All the acting teachers wanted me on probation, because they didn’t think I was trying hard enough.” Not for the first or last time, he held his ground. “It was just to spur me to do better I think, but I definitely argued.”

He stayed for the full course at Juilliard, though it was a challenge, not only because he’d relaxed his own non-drinking rule but also because he was maintaining a long-distance relationship with a girlfriend back in Florida. “For me, the twenties were the more difficult part of life. Four years is just… masochistic. We were a particularly close group but still, it’s really intense.” (Among his fellow students at the time were the actress Jessica Chastain, with whom he starred in the 2014 mob drama A Most Violent Year, and Sam Gold, his director in Hamlet.) He says he broadly kept it together: “I was never a mess, I just had a lot of confusion.” He got himself an agent in the graduation scrum, and soon started picking up work: a Law & Order here, a Shakespeare in the Park there; even, in 2006, a biblical story to rival his early efforts, playing Joseph in The Nativity Story (the first film to hold its premiere at the Vatican, no less).

By the time he enrolled at Juilliard he had already dropped “Hernández” and started going by Oscar Isaac, his two first given names. And for good reason. “When I was in Miami, there were a couple of other Oscar Hernándezes I would see at auditions. All [casting directors] would see me for was 'the gangster’ or whatever, so I was like, 'Well, let me see if this helps.’ I remember there was a casting director down there because [Men in Black director] Barry Sonnenfeld was doing a movie; she said, 'Let’s bring in this Oscar Isaac,’ and he was like, 'No no no! I just want Cubans!’ I saw Barry Sonnenfeld a couple of years ago and I told him that story — 'I don’t want a Jew, I want a Cuban!’”

Perhaps it’s a sad indictment of the entertainment industry that a Latino actor can’t expect a fair run at parts without erasing some of the ethnic signifiers in his own name, but on a personal basis at least, Isaac’s diverse role roster speaks to the canniness of his decision. He has played an English king in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood(2010), a Russian security guard in Madonna’s Edward-and-Mrs-Simpson drama W.E. (2011), an Armenian medical student in Terry George’s The Promise (2017) and — yes, Barry — a small, dark American Jew channelling a large blond Swede.

But then, of course, there are roles he’s played where ethnicity was all but irrelevant and talent was everything. Carey Mulligan’s ex-con husband Standard in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive in 2011 (another contender for his “spectacular deaths” series); mysterious technocrat Nathan Bateman in the beautifully poised sci-fi Ex Machina (2014) written and directed by Alex Garland (with whom he has also shot Annihilation — dashing between different sound stages at Pinewood while shooting The Last Jedi — which is due out next year). Or this month’s Suburbicon, a neat black comedy directed by George Clooney from an ancient Coen brothers script, in which Isaac cameos as a claims investigator looking into some dodgy paperwork filed by Julianne Moore and Matt Damon, and lights up every one of his brief scenes.

Isaac is a very modern kind of actor: one who shows range and versatility without being bland; who is handsome with his dark, intense eyes, heavy brows and thick curls, but not so freakishly handsome that it is distracting; who shows a casual disregard for the significance of celebrity and keeps his family, including his father, who remarried and had another son and daughter, close. It’s a testament to his skill that when he takes on a character, be it English royal or Greenwich Village pauper, it feels like — with the possible exception of Ray LaMontagne — it could never have been anyone else.

Today, though, he’s a Danish prince. To say that Isaac’s turn in Hamlet has caused a frenzy in New York would be something of an understatement. Certainly, it’s a sell-out. The Sunday before we meet, Al Pacino had been in. So scarce are tickets that Isaac’s own publicist says she’s unlikely to be able to get me one, and as soon as our interview is over I hightail it to the Public Theater to queue up to be put on the waiting list for returns for tonight’s performance. (I am seventh in line, and in my shameless desperation I tell the woman in front of me that I’ve flown over from London just to interview Isaac in the hope that she might let me jump the queue. She ponders it for a nanosecond, before another woman behind me starts talking about how her day job involves painting pictures of chimpanzees, and I lose the crowd.)

Clearly, Hamlet is occupying a great deal of Isaac’s available brain space right now, and not just the fact that he’s had to memorise approximately 1,500 lines. “Even tonight it’s different, what the play means to me,” he says. “It’s almost like a religious text, because it has the ambiguity of the Bible where you can look at one line and it can mean so many different things depending on how you meditate on it. Even when I have a night where I feel not particularly connected emotionally, it can still teach me. I’ll say a line and I’ll say, 'Ah, that’s good advice, Shakespeare, thank you.’”

Hamlet resonates with Isaac for reasons that he would never have foreseen or have wished for. While playing a young man mourning the untimely death of his father, Isaac was himself a young man mourning the untimely death of his mother, who died in February after an illness. Doing the play became a way to process his loss.

“It’s almost like this is the only framework where you can give expression to such intense emotions. Otherwise anywhere else is pretty inappropriate, unless you’re just in a room screaming to yourself,” he says. “This play is a beautiful morality tale about how to get through grief; to experience it every night for the last four months has definitely been cathartic but also educational; it has given structure to something that felt so overwhelming.”

In March, a month after Eugenia died, Isaac and Lind married, and then in April Eugene, named in remembrance of his late grandmother, was born. I ask Isaac about the shift in perspective that happens when you become a parent; whether he felt his own focus switch from being a son to being a father.

“It happened in a very dramatic way,” he says. “In a matter of three months my mother passed and my son was born, so that transition was very alive, to the point where I was telling my mom, 'I think you’re going to see him on the way out, tell him to listen to me as much as he can…’” He gives another laugh, but flat this time. “It was really tough because for me she was the only true example of unconditional love. It’s painful to know that that won’t exist for me anymore, other than me giving it to him. So now this isn’t happening” — he raises his arms towards the ceiling, gesturing a flow coming down towards him — “but now it goes this way” — he brings his arms down, making the same gesture, but flowing from him to the floor.

Does performing Hamlet, however pertinent its themes, ever feel like a way of refracting his own experiences, rather than feeling them in their rawest form?

“Yeah it is,” he says, “I’m sure when it’s over I don’t know how those things will live.” He pauses. “I’m a little bit… I don’t know if 'concerned’ is the right word, but as there’s only two weeks left of doing it, I’m curious to see what’s on the other end, when there’s no place to put it all.”

It’s a thoughtful, honest answer; one that doesn’t shy away from the emotional complexities of what he’s experiencing and is still to face, but admits to his own ignorance of what comes next. Because, although Isaac is clearly dedicated to his current lot, he has also suffered enough slings and arrows to know where self-determination has its limits.

What he does know is happening on the other end of Hamlet is “disconnection”, also known as a holiday, and he plans to travel with Lind to Maine where her documentary, Bobbi Jene, is screening at a film festival. Then he will fly to Buenos Aires for a couple of months filming Operation Finale, a drama about the 1960 Israeli capture of Adolf Eichmann which Isaac is producing and in which he also stars as Mossad agent Peter Malkin, with Eichmann played by Sir Ben Kingsley. At some point after that he will get sucked into the vortex of promotion for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, of which today’s interview is an early glimmer.

But before that, he will unlock the immaculate black bicycle that he had chained up outside the hotel and disappear back into Brooklyn. Later, he will take the subway to Manhattan an hour-and-a-half or so before curtain. To get himself ready, and if the mood takes him, he will listen to Venezuelan musician Arca’s self-titled album or Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie and Lowell, light a candle, and look at a picture of his mother that he keeps in his dressing room.

Then, just before seven o'clock, he will make his way to the stage where, for the next four hours, he will make the packed house believe he is thinking Hamlet’s thoughts for the very first time, and strut around in his underpants feigning madness, and — for reasons that make a lot more sense if you’re there which, thanks to a last-minute phone-call from the office of someone whose name I never did catch, I was — stab a lasagna. And then at the end of Act V, when Hamlet lies dead, and as lightning staggers across the night sky outside the theatre, finally bringing the promised drama to the Manhattan skyline, the audience, as one, will rise.

Fashion by Allan Kennedy. Star Wars: The Last Jedi is out on 15 December. The December issue of Esquire is out now.

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#oscar isaac #esquire uk #star wars #the last jedi #interview #david slijper #article

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downinfront · 5 years ago

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We deserve ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.’

Overstuffed, overcorrecting, and overthought, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is a confused, enthralling mess disguised as a love-letter to a fandom that long ago showed they didn't deserve it. It doesn't suffer for lack of craftsmanship or performance or even spirit, necessarily. This is, if nothing else, a very fun movie. But it's content to paint with a broad brush in a way that falls between smug and skittish; Skywalker merrily rehashes old plot lines, digs up old characters (alternate title: Star Wars — Episode IX: Hey, It's That Guy!) and shoehorns any and every element of fan service it can think of on the way to a conclusion that is rather moving in spite of itself. Here, it seems to be saying, is the Star Wars you all wanted.

In this film's defense, pandering might not be the worst thing in the world — the Marvel movies are 75% fan service and are reliably good to very good — but what this one suffers from is a distinct lack of imagination in a way that none of the other movies could truly claim. The prequels had their sprawling, elemental planets; Return of the Jedi had its toy chest of creatures; even Solo had a droid with a sex drive. In contrast, there's nothing in Skywalker you can't see coming, or at least vaguely sense from a mile off.

That's doubly disappointing in the wake of Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi, which gleefully set fire to almost every Star Wars plot convention and took the new films' dangling story threads in strange, interesting new directions. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) turned out to be a grizzled, regret-filled hermit; Poe Dameron's (Oscar Isaac) dashing pigheadedness got a lot of people killed; looming final boss Snoke (Andy Serkis) got sliced in half at the top of Act Three. The fanboys hated it. So, duly chastised, J.J. Abrams returns to the director’s chair, cracks his knuckles and undoes or muddles nearly all of Johnson's creative choices to bring the saga back to safe, more palatable harbor by bringing an old villain back from the dead and awkwardly maneuvering the boat back into the lane he'd laid out in 2015's fun, reverential reboot The Force Awakens.

To its credit, The Rise of Skywalker retains the zippy joy of that ebullient thriller. This is a very enjoyable movie to watch, all constant motion, thundering pathos and a fair amount of genuine emotional weight. But Abrams' rough remolding unwittingly strips away the nuance from a story that had begun to show tantalizing signs of grey. Rey (Daisy Ridley) always had the potential to move (or destroy) worlds and The Last Jedi fascinatingly cast her as a nobody, toying with the idea that anyone possesses the capacity to do great and terrible things. Now, in keeping with the mysterious groundwork Awakens laid about her parentage, she is revealed to be very much somebody, the heiress to legacies both literal and figurative and thus a more fitting wielder of power. The violent longing of the lonely Kylo Ren (an unchallenged Adam Driver) is folded into the resurrection of Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid, still having way more fun than anybody in these movies); for much of Kylo’s screen time he’s an errand boy for the big bad, finally the Darth Vader knockoff he always wanted to be and that much less interesting as a result. Even the people in the new Star Wars want to be in the original Star Wars, seems to be the message.

Luckily for them, the people making the new ones want to be making the old ones, too. Abrams opens the gates so legacy characters can pass through for a cup of coffee (Hi, Lando!). Dead characters walk as ghosts. Dead actors are oddly though not unlovingly shoehorned into the narrative. (Farewell, Carrie Fisher. It shouldn't have been like this.) It's not all unpleasant. We, too, are fans of Star Wars, and watching the Millennium Falcon lead an armada into the final battle is not without its visual grandeur, nor is the battle between Rey and Kylo on the splintered, shipwrecked hull of the Death Star. But I kept wishing there was more of Keri Russell's masked bandit, or Kelly Marie Tran's rudely sidelined Rose Tico, or even John Boyega's Finn, who went from rudderless turncoat to generic good guy so fast it barely registered. (Luckily, Boyega's not-asexual chemistry with Poe is one of the movie's consistently entertaining high points, but his connection with another rebel played by Naomi Ackie goes underexplored.)

That these fascinating characters — born into loss and trauma and the responsibility of finishing the work their parents abandoned — are forced to cede the stage to the familiar comforts of Good vs. Evil may make the internet happy, but it does no service to a story whose charm always lay in its complexity and its imagination. As it is, Rise of Skywalker doesn't have a lot of either. It wants to love and be loved unconditionally and collapses under the weight of its own devotion. It's an IOU that knows not what it's apologizing for, a beautiful bouquet that smells like your ex. It is, undoubtedly, the Star Wars we wanted; it is, depressingly, the Star Wars we deserve.

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biofunmy · 5 years ago

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‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ Review: Revolution No. 9

Not that anybody has asked, but if I had to come up with a definitive ranking of all the “Star Wars” episodes — leaving out sidebars like the animated “Clone Wars,” the young Han Solo movie and the latest “Mandalorian” Baby Yoda memes — the result could only be a nine-way tie for fourth place.

You know I’m right, even if you insist on making a case for “The Empire Strikes Back” or “The Last Jedi,” to name the two installments that are usually cited as the best individual movies. (Please do not insist.) At least since “The Return of the Jedi” (1983), the point of each chapter has been consolidation rather than distinction. For a single film to risk being too interesting would be to imperil the long-term strategy of cultivating a multigenerational, multinational fandom. “The Rise of Skywalker” — Episode IX, in case you’ve lost count — is one of the best. (It opens Friday.) Also one of the worst. Perfectly middling. It all amounts to the same thing.

In retrospect, it’s clear that the series has evolved — or was designed, if you favor that theology — to average out over time, to be good enough for its various and expanding constituencies without alienating any of them. Over the years, my own allegiances have shifted. When I was a kid back in the “New Hope” era, I liked the action and the wisecracks and Princess Leia. By the end of Anakin Skywalker’s grim journey to the Dark Side in “Revenge of the Sith” I had developed a scholarly preoccupation with the political theory of galactic imperialism. More recently I’ve grown fond of some of the cute new droids and space creatures, and also of the spunky resistance fighters with their one-syllable names. Rey. Finn. Poe.

They are back, of course — played with unflagging conviction by Daisy Ridley, John Boyega and Oscar Isaac. Also back is everyone’s favorite Dark-Side-curious emo-Jedi bad boyfriend, Mr. Kylo Ren, formerly known as Ben Solo and irrefutably embodied by Adam Driver. I will say very little about what any of these people — or C-3PO, Chewbacca, BB-8 and any new characters or surprises — actually do for two and a half hours, because the spoiler-sensitive constituency is especially large and vocal.

Also because they do and say quite a lot. “The Rise of Skywalker” has at least five hours worth of plot, and if that’s your particular fetish, I’m not going to get in the way of your fun. Suffice to say that various items need to be collected from planets with exotic names, and that bad guys cackle and rant on the bridges of massive spaceships while good guys zip around bravely doing the work of resistance. Mysteries are solved. Sacrifices are made. Fights are fought in the air, on the ground and in deep cavernous spaces where … but that’s enough for now.

The director is J.J. Abrams, perhaps the most consistent B student in modern popular culture. He has shepherded George Lucas’s mythomaniacal creations in the Disney era, making the old galaxy a more diverse and also a less idiosyncratic place.

Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed “The Last Jedi,” injected some rich color and complicated emotion into the chronicles of domination and rebellion, and also a dash of iconoclastic energy. The bond between Rey and Kylo felt both politically dangerous and sexually provocative, while Rey’s obscure origins suggested that the rebels might finally come to represent something more genuinely democratic than the enlightened wing of the galactic ruling class.

Abrams, who also directed “The Force Awakens,” the first chapter in this trilogy, suppresses that potential, reaffirming the historic “Star Wars” commitment to dynastic bloodlines and messianic mumbo-jumbo, even as he ends on a note of huggy, smiley pseudo-populism. The whole Kylo-Rey thing turns out to involve their grandparents, which is kind of weird, though it could have added a shiver of gothic creepiness to the story. Ridley and Driver are downright valiant in their pursuit of tragic dignity in increasingly preposterous circumstances.

Abrams is too slick and shallow a filmmaker to endow the dramas of repression and insurgency, of family fate and individual destiny, of solidarity and the will to power, with their full moral and metaphysical weight. At the same time, his pseudo-visionary self-importance won’t allow him to surrender to whimsy or mischief. The struggle of good against evil feels less like a cosmic battle than a longstanding sports rivalry between teams whose glory days are receding. The head coaches come and go, the uniforms are redesigned, certain key players are the subjects of trade rumors, and the fans keep showing up.

Which is not entirely terrible. “The Rise of Skywalker” isn’t a great “Star Wars” movie, but that may be because there is no such thing. That seems to be the way we like it.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Rated PG-13. Kylo feels really bad. Running time: 2 hours 22 minutes.

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gossipnetwork-blog · 8 years ago

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Peter Travers: 'The Last Jedi' Is the 'Star Wars' Epic You've Been Looking For

New Post has been published on http://gossip.network/peter-travers-the-last-jedi-is-the-star-wars-epic-youve-been-looking-for/

Peter Travers: 'The Last Jedi' Is the 'Star Wars' Epic You've Been Looking For

This review is a no-spoilers zone, so so let’s cut to the chase: The Last Jedi – Episode VIII of the Star Wars saga – is simply stupendous, a volcano of creative ideas in full eruption. Writer-director Rian Johnson, known for indies such as Looper and Brick, eases into epic filmmaking like a pro. The Star Wars universe is the best toy box a fanboy could ever wish for, and Johnson makes sure that Jedi is bursting at the seams with knockout fun surprises, marvelous adventure and shocking revelations that will leave your head spinning. Even those few jaded doubters, the ones still reeling from the disastrous trilogy of prequels perpetrated by George Lucas, will roar like Wookies and holler, “Holy shit!”

Want lightsaber duels, X-wing dogfights, exotic creatures (oh, those crystal ice-critters!), criss-crossing family bloodlines (“Who’s your daddy?” gets asked a lot), high-end FX and lowdown farce? It’s all here. But Johnson takes it to the next level, leading us through so many trap doors and blind alleys that we can’t tell the dark side from the light. Heroes die and villains thrive … and then it’s the reverse. That’s the point of the movie, which brims over with characters on a tightrope.

The plot picks up where director J.J. Abrams left off in 2015’s The Force Awakens. The Resistance, led by Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) – she’s now a general – is again fighting the evil First Order, commanded by Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis in peak motion-capture form). Resistance fighter Rey (Daisy Ridley) has traveled to the isolated island of Ahch-To, the site of the Jedi Order’s first temple. The goal: to find AWOL Jedi master Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and drag his depressed hermit ass back to save the galaxy and whip sense into his conflicted nephew. That would be Ben Solo, aka Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), who last time out killed his own father and now gives his mom, Leia, no end of heartache.

Just when you think you know where this movie is going, Johnson pulls the rug out from under you. Old friends are back, including R2-D2, C-3PO and the immortal Chewbacca. Ex Stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega), proud to be called “rebel scum,” teams up with newbie Rose (Kelly Marie Tran), a mechanic with skills to plan a daring rescue for the Resistance. Benicio del Toro is the life of the party as a thief and codebreaker no one can trust. Fighter pilot Poe Dameron (a dashing Oscar Isaac) has his own misgivings about Vice-Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern), the autocrat who takes command when Leia is knocked out of commission. The Last Jedi marks a sad farewell to Fisher, who died a year ago and whose slyly comic and deeply felt performance shows again why she’s irreplaceable.

OK, there are nitpicks. It’s simply too long at two hours and 36 minutes – and sometimes too damn much. The screen is so crowded with character and incident that you might need a scorecard to keep up. But the way Johnson, who’s slated to direct three more Star Wars films with unfamiliar characters, balances the skyrocketing action with tender feeling keeps you emphatically in the game. The actors are stellar in big roles and small. Ridley and Driver knock it out of the park as Rey and Ren, two characters drawn together by a Force neither understands.

Still, The Last Jedi belongs to Hamill in a portrayal that cuts to the core of what Star Wars means to a generation of dreamers looking to the heavens. In the 40 years since the actor first played Luke Skywalker, we’ve followed him from callow youth to Jedi master. But it’s here that Hamill gives the performance of his career, nailing every nuance of an iconic role and rewarding the emotional investment we’ve made in him. There are people, places and things you’ll have to say goodbye to in Episode VIII, even the laughs are tinged with tears. Never fear. You’re in hyper-skilled hands with Johnson who makes sure you leave the multiplex feeling euphoric. The middle part of the current trilogy, The Last Jedi ranks with the very best Star Wars epics (even the pinnacle that is The Empire Strikes Back) by pointing the way ahead to a next generation of skywalkers – and, thrillingly, to a new hope.

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