All posts by Steve Stern

Star Wars and Starbucks

Film, Uncategorized
Star Wars: The Force Awakens Ph: Film Frame ©Lucasfilm 2015
Star Wars: The Force Awakens film frame ©Lucasfilm 2015

“Star Wars, the Franchise Awakens” touches on each and every trope of the original, bigger and better of course and lots of fun. Mike Moore  

We saw Star Wars: The Force Awakens over our Christmas holiday in the mountains and it reminded me of Starbucks. I mean that in the best possible way, I like Starbucks. I really, really, do; a lot. Early in the morning, on the way somewhere, there is no better place to stop to pick up a breakfast on the go. The small Starbucks’ Double Cappuccino, with nonfat milk, is excellent – even if they want to call the small cup Tall – and the Double-Smoked Bacon, Cheddar & Egg Sandwich is always tasty and very satisfying. It is the perfect breakfast for eating in the car.  I feel pretty much the same way about Star Wars: The Force Awakens except for the car bit. It was good, very good. But the thing about Starbucks is that the breakfast is planned to be consistent and non-offensive. That consistency means that my breakfast sandwich is always very good, never a disappointment, but never great either. It is never quirky or idiosyncratic, it does not reflect the personality of the person who made it. I never walk out of Starbucks saying Wow, was THAT a pleasant surprise.

As an aside, that consistency and tight control relates to the current residential zoning regulations in most of California. In an effort to protect us from having to live with a supposed eyesore down the block, anything that deviates from an authorized sameness is banned. So we have no bad houses in the neighborhood, but no great houses either. End aside.

If nothing else, the original Star Wars, now called Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, was idiosyncratic, quirky even. George Lucas has made many, what most people consider to be horrible, movies; think Star Wars I through III, but he also made two of the most treasured movies ever. Those lousy movies and the great movies are related. The idiosyncrasy of collecting snippets of Westerns, Flash Gordon movies, Errol Flynn sword fight movies, War Movies like The Dam Busters, even Casablanca, and putting them in a plot lifted primarily – from Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, worked. And it still works, sure most of the acting is not very good and the plot is silly – to be charitable – but Star Wars has become one of almost every body’s treasured memories.

Indeed, the silly plot is a big part of Star Wars’ charm and one of the reasons, along with the action figures of course, it has become so big a part of our pop culture. From reading some of the things that George Lucas has said, it seems his main interest is experimental film collages, and I get the feeling that he likes Star Wars I through III better than IV, while we have fallen in love with IV because of the characters and their stories. Star Wars VII, The Force Awakens , directed by J.J. Abrams who, from all accounts, was under the tight control of Disney – understandably so seeing that they paid  $4.05 billion for, basically, an idea and the accompanying copyrights – is more a reboot of the franchise than a sequel.

Han Solo still dresses like a cross between a Indiana Jones and a Wild Bill Hickok, the heroes still have lightsaber fights, the spaceships still fly around like WWII airplanes – then popping off the planet very unlike, say, a  Saturn V rocket that seems to stand on its fiery tail for hours – but we have a new Orphan-on-a-Desert Planet, and a new R2D2 in BB-8, and and a new guy in a fancier black mask (but, mercifully, no Jar Jar Binks). Not all, but many of the scenes still change with wipes copied by Lucas from early black and white movies and the plot feels eerily familiar, still, it didn’t quite feel like a Lucas movie to me.

For one thing, the acting is much better. Daisy Ridley as Luke Rey was especially good and one lightsaber fight, in particular, is a stunner and very Kill Billish, taking place in a snowy forest with big snowflakes falling. One thing that is very Lucasian is that The Force Awakens was shot at real places and it looks like it ( although I suspect the shots of Ren’s home planet, Jakku, were really shot on Tatooine). All in all, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a much better than average action movie that doesn’t quite have the DNA of the Lucas films and may be better for that. It is a thrilling ride, sometimes funny and and sometimes touching.

Happy New Year

Film, Sierras

Xmas (1 of 1)-2After two offline weeks at Michele’s family cabin in Olympic Valley – which everybody calls Squaw Valley, but is officially Olympic Valley because the Squaw Valley name was already taken by a small town in Fresno County where one can buy 5.6 acres with a well for $65,000 – we are back home. We had a good time, hosting family for Christmas and friends for New Years, but it is always good to be back in home (for Precious Mae, it is great to be back home as she spent most of her time hiding from visitors by sleeping under our bed at the cabin). We went to Reno to see a couple of movies, Star Wars in a packed house, of course, and The Big Short, in an almost empty theater, did some walking, Michele did some skiing, I did some photoing, and we both did alot of watching it snow. We also went to the Nevada Museum of Art to see a superb show on Tahoe.

Starting at the end, Michele, at the suggestion of her sister, Claudia, campaigned for a visit to the Nevada Museum of Art. It is just down the street from an Adult Fantasy Store – crazy  sexy  hot – in a Reno neighborhood that is an up and coming art/restaurant area. The museum was new to us and we both loved it. It had us at the Deborah Butterfield bronze horse outside.

Martis Valley (1 of 1)-4Inside, the show was terrific (no pictures allowed), ranging from a huge 1865 Albert Bierstadt painting to Frank Lloyd Wright drawings for unbuilt – fortunately – houses on Emerald Bay. From several Maynard Dixons, including a stellar portrait of a pine, to a luminous, Thiebaud-esque, painting of Emerald Bay by Gregory Kondos, to fabulous  Washoe Indian – Native American? Indigenous People? – baskets, to a collection of postcards (with a backdrop of a window overlooking the neighborhood).Reno Museum (1 of 1)-2On the day that Michele went skiing, I wandered over to the east side of Lake Tahoe to photograph the boulders at Sand Harbor, the view from the Mt. Rose Highway, and the gloaming twilight in Martis Valley.Tahoe view (1 of 1)-2Tahoe view (1 of 1)Martis Valley (1 of 1)We were at the cabin just a day short of two weeks and one of the things that sort of surprised me was the logistics of getting around. Several days the temp was in the single digits at night and in the teens during the hottest least cold part of the day, definitely parka over light fleece weather. The problem, though, is that most places seem to keep their thermostats set at about 80° which translates to about 107° under a parka and fleece; and where does one put the gloves, and what about the hat? Watching Star Wars, I had a sizable pile of winter clothing on my lap. We fared better in The Big Short because the seats were strangely wide and the theater was almost empty. That is a pity because the movie is terrific, a perfect example of Steve Allen’s observation that comedy is tragedy plus time. 

The Big Short is based on the book of the same name, written by Michael Lewis, and I thought the movie – by Adam McKay, a director whose previously best movie was Anchorman – is about the roots of the 2007-08 meltdown and several of the people who saw it coming and bet against, essentially, us. The Big Short is funny – very funny – and more informative than I expected. I was especially dazzled by Christian Bale who plays Michael Burry, a savant who sees that the numbers don’t add up. He is so different from Bruce Wayne or Irving Rosenfeld, the con man in American Hustle, that I didn’t recognize him.

As an aside, there are several scenes in The Big Short in which the camera cuts away from the action to have celebrities explain various arcane financial instruments such as Selena Gomez explaining Synthetic CDOs (collateralized debt obligations). It was brilliant and got me thinking how hard it must be to make an aside like that work. Quentin Tarantino made it work in inglorious Basterds in which he broke the action to explain how nitrate film is flammable, but I can’t remember another example. End aside.

Now, at home, watching it rain from a dark sky, the snow seems almost mythical, but it wasn’t. The snow’s inconvenience and beauty were everywhere. Martis Valley (1 of 1)-2Martis Valley (1 of 1)-3

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, etc, etc,etc…

Uncategorized

Xmas (1 of 1)We are going to mountains for a White Christmas and will be back somewhere around January 4th.

(As various people, ranging from friends to the White House, wish me a Happy Holidays, I have become more aware that I usually wish them a Merry Christmas. I don’t believe in the Christmas Story but I did grow up with this time of year being Christmas and Merry Christmas just seems more natural. The important thing is that the Solstice is over and the Light is coming back; that is a Universal Story no matter what it is called.)

So Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays and Happy New Year and may we all be blessed by our favorite Story.

For a little comfort in the still long darkness, here is Ken Burns on the Intergalactic Civil War.

A couple of related questions

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings

Chaos (1 of 1)Listening to the Republicans talking trash at the last debate made me wonder why countries do things to get a result that is a action they wouldn’t do. Wow, is that clumsy-ly said, what I mean is almost everybody wants to bomb ISIS in an effort to beat them and it’s not just the Republican either. Obama is bombing ISIS on the theory that it will, atleast, degrade them and Hillary wants more bombing. Why do they – we – think that bombing ISIS will get them to do anything except dig in? Is there anybody who thinks we would quit our attacks on ISIS if they blew up another World Trade Center? I doubt it, most Americans think it would make us more resolute. So why don’t we think the same thing will happen with ISIS?

A disclaimer here, I didn’t see the entire Republican debate and part of what I didn’t see is the Trump quote I am going to reference. I saw it, out of context on a MSNBC program. When asked about what he would do in Syria – or maybe the Middle East in general – Trump shook his head and said that it was a mess, saying something like “We shouldn’t have ever gone into Iraq and we shouldn’t there now. It’s just a mess. We’ve spent hundreds of millions that could have been used on infrastructure and schools.” That’s a much more sensible statement than anything I’ve heard out of Hillary.

And that brings up the second question, why are people, not just Republicans but Democrats and Liberals, so attached to ad hominem criticism. Why do we criticize an idea with the argument that it is bad because Trump, for instance, said it, rather than discussing the idea itself. People on the left, friends, columnists, anybody on the left sending a political email, are disdainful of something that Trump said, not because of the idea, the idea is never really considered, Trump said it, so it must be ridicules and bad. A big part of our collective won’t even listen to Berni’s ideas. He is a socialist, or a cranky old man, or not going to win anyway, so don’t listen to what he has to say.

If we don’t listen to their ideas, how do we know ours are better?

I am so looking forward to the new Star Wars…

Film

Screen_Shot_2015-04-16_at_1.38.59_PM.0which is a little surprising because I don’t consider myself a Star Wars fan. Don’t get me wrong, I stood in line for the first Star Wars pretty early in the cycle and I was glad I did. The opening sequence was worth the price of admission alone: that little Bambi spaceship going by at full throttle followed by a huge spaceship, that went on and on, gliding by with a low rumble. I had never seen anything like that, it was breathtaking. Still, I thought the The Empire Strikes Back was only OK, and the third movie was the first movie all over again, only way not as good. I did see one prequel in a theater and one more on TV but I am not sure that I even saw the end, by then I was bored.

But there is something about Star Wars, the first Star Wars, that is unexplainable.  The movie opened in a small number of theaters with very little fanfare, and instantly lines formed. We went to San Francisco to see it at the Coronet on Geary – I think that may have been the closest place, to the South Bay, that we could see it – and we waited in line for over three hours for a one o’clock showing. Recognizing that R2D2 was looking for Obi-Wan Kenobi in Golden Canyon, Death Valley, was icing on the cake. Years later, while watching the sunset from Pyramid Four at Tikal, I realized that we were at the Rebel Home Base on Yavin 4. Now, almost forty years later, Star Wars has long been taken over by the collective and has, somehow, transcended George Lucas. I hope and expect that will be a very good thing.

I liked the reboot of Star Trek by J. J. Abrams, the new director,  who I have read is a huge Star Wars fan and wants to keep the original flavor. Part of that is the use of real locations and actual sets rather than C.G.I., part of it is the use of film, and part of the flavor was the use of comparatively unknown actors. Like most science fiction, Star Wars has a rightist sensibility – watch Jay explain it in Clerks II – in which the deposed Royalty take back their rightful control of the galaxy. This movie promises to be much Liberaler.

In the first trailer, the first line is “Who are you?” asked by a disembodied voice of a nameless scavenger who  is repelling down a wall inside a crashed Imperial cruiser, “I’m no one” is the answer. The scavenger is played by Daisy Ridley and she is as close to no one as anybody could hope for. According to her interviews, she was nobody “working in a beer and ale house” while trying to get acting gigs, when she read for Star Wars not even knowing what the movie or part was. By next month, Daisy Ridley will be one of the most recognizable people on the planet. I like that.

I suspect that this will be a very good Star Wars, I hope so.