Is it Tenet day or Mulan day where you are?
Our Friday Free-For-All digs into the various ways new films are arriving this week
It’s Friday, September 4, and here’s where we are.
Depending on where you are in America today, it might or might not be Tenet day for you.
It is most assuredly not Tenet day here. It will not be Tenet day here until they release the film for viewing at home. I’ve explained why at length, and I am growing tired of the conversation. As Dwayne Johnson and his family announce that they’ve contracted COVID-19 and the Jurassic Park sequel scales back its filming plans because crew members are getting sick and The Batman closes down again because Robert Pattinson is sick a mere three days after they started back to work, it seems to me like we’re clearly fucking things up. We aren’t moving in the right direction, no matter how much we wish we were, and we’re making choices that are going to impact people’s health for decades, and we are doing it wrong.
But, hey, enjoy the explosions in IMAX, folks. I’m sure you’ll be fine.
There are a variety of options for you that do not involve going to a movie theater, however, including a new Charlie Kaufman film that I am absolutely dying to lay eyes on, three episodes of a new science-fiction series from Ridley Scott, and perhaps the biggest-budget title to be released directly to the home streaming market since the beginning of this pandemic. One of the things that makes me craziest about the “debate” right now about movie theaters is that there is no argument that makes attendance to them essential or urgent other than “I want to do it.”
That’s fine if that’s your motivation. I get it. I find myself torn 20 times a week right now between what I want to do and what I think we should be doing, and each time, I default to what I think we should be doing because my whims aren’t more important than the general public health. At least, not to me. I think calling people names over this stuff is unfortunate, and when I see movie critics screaming at other critics in their timeline that anyone who doesn’t go to a movie theater right now is “a pussy,” it makes me wonder how we all got this deeply broken.
This is a recreational activity. I love movies profoundly, and I am fortunate enough to have made them part of the everyday fabric of my life, but even so, they are a recreational activity. They are a business that exists to create entertainment and, in some cases, even something more enduring, but they are not essential to the operation of things.
Especially not when there is already so much out there for us to enjoy. I hate saying this, even hypothetically, but let’s say everything stopped production tomorrow and we had no new films or TV shows for the next two years…
… so? I mean, I get the economic impact, which would be cataclysmic, but in terms of the impact beyond that? We’d get over it. We would adapt. There’s so much out there that is owned but not currently available that, at worst, catalog owners would have to start getting creative about how they repackage things. One thing they would not do, though, is run out of things, because it’s just not possible. As it stands, only a fraction of what the various studios own is available to you at any given time, and I don’t think that’s a bug. I think it’s by design. They don’t really want to give you the freedom to watch whatever you want whenever you want. They want to give you the illusion and then keep you on the hook.
But is it any good for us, having this kind of unprecedented access to this much media? I’ve been thinking more about this, and I really do think we’re drowning.
I did a little math. Right now, I personally have instant access to roughly 35,000 different films. All of them accessible as long as I have internet access. Beyond that, I have at least 2000 different TV shows I can watch, start to finish, right this moment.
That is an undigestible amount of media. It is more media than I will ever consume. This is not counting any of the streaming services I subscribe to or the movies that air on cable or the stuff that is currently airing. That’s not even including the physical media in the house. That’s just from my private streaming media ecosystem.
I don’t tell you this to impress you. Frankly, that might be too much media. I can’t imagine most people would ever need that many films, and most of what I have access to is stuff that most people wouldn’t watch on a regular basis. I’ve spent the past five years putting together a library of every single movie commercially released in theaters in the United States in the ‘80s. That’s not something everyone needs, but it’s now something I’ve got, and it’s just part of the larger collection.
I tell you this because this kind of access to this amount of media has, if anything, made my viewing habits even weirder, and I recently became aware of how easy it is for all of it to start to blur together into a homogenous moosh in your memory, especially when we’re watching all of it in this bizarre pandemic time, this ForeverNever that makes every day feel like a month and which erases all the typical milestones we use in memory.
As I work on my ‘80s book, part of it is writing about the experience of seeing films in the ‘80s, and I’m amazed how I can still recall who I saw many of these films with, where I saw them, and the actual experience around the viewing, but if you asked me to describe the “event” around anything I’ve watched since March, I’d be at a loss. That’s not just the pandemic’s fault, either. I’m sure I’m an extreme example, but I think access to media is flattening everything out and turning it all into a wall of noise as opposed to discrete and individual pieces of art that mean something to us.
There’s a real danger to turning everything into a commodity and a franchise and a big business, and even the best intentions can end up soured.
Which brings us to today’s first item…
NOTHIN’ BUT STAR WARS
There are moments in pop culture that have truly confounded me as a writer, and the release of The Rise of Skywalker was one of them. Even now, I find the entire thing so frustrating that it’s easier to just not write about it or talk about it than it is to sort out exactly why it bothers me so much.
See, I got tired of hearing people bitch about Star Wars. I’m not saying that anyone is wrong for disliking anything, but rather that the conversation around Star Wars became so non-stop horrible that I got tired of listening to it. That started around the time of the prequels, but it escalated to a breaking point for me with the release of The Last Jedi. There’s a cottage industry that has sprung up around a particularly grotesque and misogynistic view of Kathleen Kennedy, this weird echo chamber of hate, so far removed from the reality of how any film gets made, much less how Star Wars films get made, that I can barely take it seriously.
But there’s no question when you look at The Rise of Skywalker that Star Wars is broken in some fundamental way, and it’s not just the difference between JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson and Jon Favreau. In one sense, it’s very simple. Star Wars was, for most of its life, the work of one person. Yes, George Lucas had amazing collaborators throughout the original trilogy, but he was always the one in charge. It began with him, and when it came to the final decision, it was always his. Star Wars was a personal story that happened to become a multi-generational myth, and the tension between those two things is what made it so interesting. Even when people hated the prequels, at least you knew you were watching something that was one person’s story, told the way they meant to tell it.
The problem that was baked into the new trilogy was with authorship. When you’re building a myth that’s meant to pass something on to a new generation, something that’s already been telling a very specific story, you can’t turn it into a game of exquisite corpse. There were so many voices in the mix for The Force Awakens, and the questions raised were raised without answers already in place. You can see this in the way each of the three films is structured. Abrams raises some questions and ideas and character notions and starts the plates spinning. Johnson takes those ideas and then bends them into some very unexpected directions. And then JJ comes in and, instead of taking the ball and running it forward, spends an entire movie basically saying, “No, that’s not what I meant at all.”
Ooof. I can’t imagine any of the actors in the film were satisfied by anything about the trilogy, but I think this week’s interview with John Boyega is a rare moment of someone coming completely clean about their dissatisfaction with the way the creative process went down on a mega-franchise train wreck. Everything he says is direct and fair and self-explanatory, so of course, people have already begun to misinterpret it and try to bend it to whatever weird agenda they’re fixed on, and that’s a shame. They should listen instead of trying to wedge him into their own narrative, which is the problem in the first place.
I understand his frustration with Finn’s journey in the three films. I think part of the problem came from Disney marketing. Part of the problem came from the way Rian took the character in a new direction in Last Jedi, one that set up narrative possibilities that Abrams had no intention of picking up in Skywalker. And part of the problem is that Hollywood thinks it can fix its race issues with easy solutions. You can hire people all day long, but if you can’t figure out what to do with them, there’s no point. When I saw Attack The Block at SXSW, it was a midnight screening, the first time it played with an audience, and I could have told you by the time the lights came up that Boyega was a movie star. Some people command your attention onscreen, and he’s one of them. It was the combination of ferocity and vulnerability, something that can be incredibly difficult to express onscreen. While I love the film for its effortless genre chops, the reason I return to it is that I think it’s one of the canniest slices of social commentary in the guise of genre fun that anyone’s released in a while. It’s just as sharp about what it’s saying as Get Out, but it does it with outer-space monsters, and I think Moses is one of those characters who offers you a chance to reflect on your own biases based on how you react to him.
The solution to Boyega’s dissatisfaction with what he did in the Star Wars films isn’t as easily fixed as “he should have had a lightsaber,” as I’m seeing in many camps online right now. Instead, his point is more about how his character (as well as the character played by Oscar Isaac) got sidelined after being pushed as significant by the studio. This plays into my problems with the way everything is focused on what is said before a film comes out and less on how people react to the actual film itself. Because everything is pre-digested culturally, marketing is less of a tease and more of a contractual promise, and when fandom doesn’t get exactly the thing they thought they were getting, it doesn’t seem equipped to deal with that dissonance.
It’s another thing entirely from the inside of that process, though, and Boyega’s feelings about how Finn got almost completely defanged by the end of the trilogy are valid and real. The only thing I can offer him that might make him feel even remotely better is that Han Solo absolutely sucks in Return of the Jedi because Lucas had no idea what to do with Han narratively, either. Han’s entire arc takes place in Empire Strikes Back. In the first film, he’s wise-ass comic relief. In the third film, he’s a dundering zero, shaking off carbon hibernation for the entire film’s running time. He’s useless, and it’s clear that Kasdan and Lucas were baffled by how to make him an essential part of the third film’s story.
When you’re writing a book or a TV show, you’re free to tell a huge ensemble’s story, and there’s a chance you can actually give all of that ensemble room to register as fully realized characters. When you’re working in film, it’s more akin to haiku. You have to work quickly. There’s a reason Peter Jackson prefers his 12-hour running time for Lord of the Rings, and that’s because he knows full well that the films as released in theaters render some of the characters and narrative threads nearly incoherent. If you really want to drill deeply into any characters in films, you have to keep the cast smaller. These three films can’t even tell the Rey story coherently and completely. There’s definitely not room for them to fully flesh out Finn and Poe Dameron and Rose Tico and Maz, much less new characters introduced in the third film.
And, look, you don’t need to flesh out every character fully in order for a film to be good. I’m not saying that. But I get full well why Boyega would feel like he was used by Disney in the end. They benefitted enormously from the idea that their new Star Wars series was inclusive and diverse, and it certainly does feature a more diverse cast, but does that result in something that actually feels like it explores anything about any of those characters or that uses that casting in a way that is interesting or that pays off?
Boyega benefits in a very real way from having been in Star Wars. One could argue that he never would have been able to set up his production company Upper Room if he hadn’t taken the role as Finn. I may love Attack The Block, but it wasn’t a giant hit, and it didn’t turn him into a household name. Star Wars, for better or for worse, put him into homes around the globe and introduced him to a wider audience than almost anything else could.
Ultimately, I’m glad he spoke up. I think Star Wars isn’t more broken than other blockbusters these days… it’s just a perfect example of how brand management can kill everything that’s good and interesting about a property in the first place. What matters now is what Boyega does moving forward. I have a feeling he’s going to make great choices as he gets older, and that we’ve only begun to see what he’s capable of as an actor and a producer. Star Wars is going to be one point on a much larger timeline, and not the thing that defines him, and quite honestly, that’s their loss, not his.
I still plan to write about The Rise of Skywalker at length someday. Right now, I think the frustration is still too fresh, and this piece only underlined some of the many reasons why.
Speaking of frustrating, let’s get to today’s big release for audiences at home…
Mulan
Yifei Liu, Donnie Yen, Li Gong, Jet Li, Jason Scott Lee, Yoson An, Tzi Ma, Rosalind Chao, Xana Tang, Ron Yuan, Jun Yu, Chen Tang, Doua Moua, Jimmy Wong, Nelson Lee, Hoon Lee, Crystal Rao, Elena Askin, Vincent Feng
cinematography by Mandy Walker
music by Harry Gregson-Williams
screenplay by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver and Elizabeth Martin & Lauren Hynek
produced by Chris Bender and Tendo Nagenda and Jason Reed and Jake Weiner
directed by Niki Caro
Rated PG-13
1 hr 55 mins
I understand Disney’s business model from a financial point of view. You already own these things, so why not find a new way to monetize them? Why not feed directly into the nostalgia that you do your best to keep constantly engorged in Disney fans?
But I do not understand anything about Disney’s business model creatively, especially when I am faced with a well-intentioned stiff like Mulan, which Disney is releasing today via what they call the Premier Access experience. If you pay $30 on top of the cost of your Disney+ subscription, you can stream the film as many times as you like until December 4, when it will be added to the service for everyone.
Only you can decide if that’s a value that makes sense for you and your family. I’ve got no larger stake in this as a Disney fan or in terms or what Mulan means to me. I can only speak to this new version as a film, and it feels to me like a theme park attraction more than an actual movie. It is handsomely-produced, but there’s no pulse to it. It’s the same problem I’ve had with a number of these live-action remakes. There’s something inert about them, and while there is work to admire in this movie, it also seems like the easiest epic journey ever made.
I’m surprised this is a PG-13, frankly, because the entire film feels like it is told at a safe remove. Everything’s been sanded down and made painless. Mulan’s arc unfolds with nary a hitch or a challenge. She hits all of the mechanical sort of turning points that every screenwriter is taught today, but there’s never a moment’s doubt that she will simply shrug off each obstacle and keep right on moving forward. The action scenes, while lovely to look at, do not feel like they actually have any impact. There’s no sense of stakes or tension. People ride around and fight and arrows get fired and it all looks very pretty, but there’s not a single sequence in the film where I feel like geography and character both matter, and those would be the hallmarks of an action sequence that matters in my book.
The closest thing is a scene involving an avalanche, and even that scene feels surprisingly small and like it happens in a void, unconnected to anything larger. I am a big fan of Whale Rider, Niki Caro’s breakthrough film, and I don’t think anything that bothers me about Mulan is necessarily her fault. She does terrific work here in terms of her cast and how she puts everything together, but she’s working in the weirdest corporate space possible here, trying to balance the desires of Disney fans and the Chinese government at the same time. That’s a spot that no one should have to navigate, and I think part of the reason the film feels so teflon is because the film feels perched somewhere between these two viewpoints, unable to decide which one actually matters.
The history of Hollywood is often the history of what’s going on outside of Hollywood. You can see the world refracted through the films they release. Look at the movies made during the Vietnam era. You’ve got the studios doing everything they can to pretend nothing’s happening, you’ve got independent films that are rubbing your nose in the cultural divide, and you’ve got an audience that’s tired of the plastic and looking for something that taps into the undeniable anxiety that underscores everything. Pick any era, look at the larger world, and then look at the various ways those things ripple through our entertainment. Mulan is a movie that could have been a great way for Hollywood to look at what China was in legend and what it is right now, all wrapped in entertainment that could be packaged in a way that made it easy to smuggle into that culture. Instead, what you’ve got here is a film that feels like it was pre-censored, carefully tailored to make sure it won’t offend anyone or jeopardize any business arrangements.
That’s not Mulan. That goes against the entire spirit of what Mulan is, culturally speaking. Yes, you’ve got the same facile empowerment message that Hollywood’s already comfortable with (girls who are capable of violence are the equal to men) and you have a very surface nod to the different ideas of honor and expectation placed on young women and young men in this culture. But again… there’s nothing difficult about what happens here, so that message rings fairly hollow. The lie that Hua Mulan lives is a dangerous one because she could be killed for it, but there’s not a moment in this film where it feels like she’s in any real danger. Not in battle, not when her secret is exposed… nothing. After all, she’s Hua Mulan. I guess that makes it okay.
Fans of the animated Disney film will be able to recognize the elements that did or didn’t make the jump, but watching both in a week, I don’t think there’s any argument that could be made that favors the new film. The characterizations are more direct in the animated film, and they lean on broad stereotypes in many ways, but there is a real sense of character to the designs and to the performances. Ming Na-Wen is terrific in the original, and so much of her personality shines through in the actual character animation. By contrast, I feel like Yifei Liu does everything she can to make her take on the character distinct, but she’s reduced to a series of girl power poses in a lot of montage footage. We never get a chance to genuinely feel what Mulan is feeling as she navigates what should be a terrifying new landscape. Even worse, you’ve got this amazing supporting cast filled with actors like Jason Scott Lee and Jet Li and Donnie Yen and Gong Li and Rosalind Chao and Tzi Ma, all terrific, all able to carry a film, all ready to rip here, and I feel like none of them get to play actual characters. They are stops along the way for Mulan, but they glance off of her instead of actually making any real impact on her.
Many of the choices made in updating the story feel like they make sense thematically, but they don’t pay off dramatically. I like the idea of Gong Li’s character, a witch who may have more in common with Mulan than with the people she’s serving, and she gets a couple of good scenes. But it doesn’t pay off and it doesn’t really serve to strengthen the story. I get why you don’t want a wise-cracking dragon sidekick, but replacing it with this weird new-agey CGI phoenix that has zero personality and that serves zero story function isn’t a choice that improves anything.
These movies may make money, but they are becoming increasingly hollow, and I can’t encourage anyone to spend the extra money to enrich Disney further when you’ll get the film in three months for a price you already pay. Mulan isn’t a bad film, but it may well be a perfect emblem for 2020: it feels like our pop culture is on pause, singing the same old songs over and over, and even when sung well, it feels like they have lost any impact they may once have had.
AND FINALLY…
It’s impressive that in one week they could release one of the worst James Bond posters of all time as well as a trailer that makes it look like No Time To Die is going to be straight-up awesome.
This is James Bond. This is a franchise that’s been around since the ‘60s, a franchise that has featured some of the most iconic film art in history. I mean, this is a James Bond poster. This is what I think of when you say that.
This is a James Bond poster.
This is a James Bond poster.
This is an insult that expects you to show up just because you are loyal to a brand.
By contrast, the new trailer feels like exactly the kind of film I haven’t seen yet this year but that I’m hungry for: slick and smart giant-scale escapism. I’m up for a redemption for Daniel Craig. SPECTRE can’t be the way we remember him, and while I’m not crazy about the return of Christoph Waltz’s Blofeld (“Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”), I hope he’s used better this time.
Besides… SUBMARINE AIRPLANE! I mean, come on.
I still won’t go to theaters unless something changes radically by November, but at least I can enjoy knowing I’ll get to see this one at home sometime in early 2021.
I’ve got a ton of stuff for subscribers that was going to be in today’s newsletter that will be in Sunday’s Spotlight instead, so if you’re not already subscribed, now’s the moment. I’ll have a piece about Charlie Kaufman’s new film and his new novel, a piece about Armando Iannucci’s joyous Dickens adaptation, and a look at some of the new documentary series that are making premium cable channels so interesting right now.
Today’s newsletter is free. Imagine what the paid subscribers get! You could be one of them for only $7 a month. It’s even less if you buy a whole year at once!
Image courtesy of Disney/Lucasfilm Ltd.
Image courtesy of Disney
Image courtesy of MGM/UA
The irony of what happened with Rise of Skywalker should be a lesson to studios. Ultimately, they listened to the ‘fans’. You know, that rabid section of fandom that didn’t shut up for a straight year as they didn’t get what they wanted. That still three years in tweet abuse directly at Rian Johnson.
Whilst the rest of us, and fans who were genuinely excited to see where the third one would go, just got tired of all the endless negativity. Itself fuelled by the media only to happy to write articles driven by a trend on social networking.
I digress....they listened to the ‘fans’ and then reworked what they had so part three gave them what they thought they wanted. At the expense of lots of it feeling anything like a natural carry-on and conclusion to what had happened in Last Jedi.
There was no reason why Abrams and co couldn’t have taken what Johnson did and made a satisfying conclusion for all those characters. Instead it became a greatest hits vs the story as it was left; and the greatest hits won out. Disney were frightened of further flaming the flamed.
It’s credit to the performances, and those first two movies, that Rey and Ren’s arcs did feel whole in the end. Even as they were muddled into this battle with the emperor’s will, instead of with each other - I still think they came out just fine. This setup of having the emperor arrive out of nowhere, with a macguffin plot to find the thing that finds him just meant Finn, Poe and disgracefully Rose, all got sidelined. For a saga all about balance, Skywalker is irrefutably lop-sided. Weighted towards trying to be everything to a section of fandom, rather than concluding a story that really works for two movies.
Anyways, I still think it’s a rocket-fuelled slice of pop that works well enough. It has highs other movies dream of. Yet it’s compromised from the get-go by being a response to the ‘criticism’ of Jedi, whilst trying to tie up where that movie left off.
Lucas wouldn’t have listened to anybody. Like you said, at least his choices were consistent. Every single film in the sequel trilogy I think is better than the prequels. Yet as a whole I kind of can’t accept the story told. Where as Lucas’s prequel story works great and really adds to the saga.
Oh well. It’s Star Wars. I don’t feel as passionate about debating it as I once did as social media and the media itself have soured it irreversibly in some ways. I’ll still get joy from talking with real fans at conventions etc, but online fandom? Forget it.
Let’s just hope the future of the franchise is completely separated from the Skywalkers like they’re promising. It’s really not worth the hassle even going there - which Disney have surely realised by now.
There was no saving SW from the get go. Without a concrete plan in place it was primed for failure which to me is baffling when we are talking about the most influential franchise in Hollywood history, you would think Disney would want to cover their bets with a solid treatment...? Strangely enough that did not happen. I truly commend John Boyega for speaking out and calling Disney out on their BS.