The Miraculous Manu Memorial Movie Month, Mmmmm!

I'm disappointed that no screencaptures of Asta were included in your The Thin Man discussion.

I'm disappointed that no screencaptures of Asta were included in your The Thin Man discussion.

Nick, Nora, and Asta are just a delight to hang out with for an hour or so, regardless of the surrounding plot.

Sunset Boulevard (1950)

Musical Accompaniment: David Bowie — Fame

There’s a moment early in Sunset Boulevard where our hero, his struggles now well-established, pulls into a decrepit old mansion’s garage (the third in a string of unfortunate coincidences) and simply lingers there for a bit, musing. It feels as though the bottom has dropped out of the film. We’re floating, adrift and bereft of plot. An extremely fluid tracking shot (already a staple of the movie, though that’ll come to an end along with the daytime scenes soon) invites us to absorb this architecture. Suddenly, a voice cries out from the presumed-abandoned mansion: “You there! Why are you so late?” And at this point, anything is possible. That’s intrigue. The movie could turn on a dime into a farce of mistaken identity, a slasher flick, a love story, a time travel story — perhaps, Field of Dreams style, the mansion can transport the main character back in time to its heyday — a Dracula knockoff, a ghost story.

Rats feeding on one of their own in the swimming pool.

Well, it is a ghost story, of sorts. It’s narrated (over-narrated) to us by a ghost. Norma is the living dead, possessed by her past, haunting her mansion. Stars from days past flit through like ships in the foggy night. There is no future for these people, there’s hardly even a present. The advent of sound pictures meant that the stars of the silent films were abandoned like so much used tissue paper, en masse. People talk about the accelerating cycle of fame these days, the internet this and the Kardashians that, but — well, put it in perspective, this is 1950. Sound was hardly a thing 22 years previously. Groundhog Day was released 22 years ago. Bill Murray had had a career in the limelight for 16 years already. And he’s still a cherished national figure today, at 64. Now granted, that’s one incredibly charismatic and savvy guy. But more importantly, the endless reruns on TV, the vast, hyper-indexed easily-accessed library we call the Internet, and even “classic rock” radio stations all work to ensure there’s a certain level of cultural continuity.

Norma Desmond, 50 in 1950, has been washed-up for at least two decades, with not a wrinkle on her face. She is, in a way, our Dracula knockoff — although this one becomes utterly absorbed in her own mirrored images, and if she invites you into her house, you can never leave. She’s Bad News in the Noir mold, where, as the hero goes in for the first kiss, there are no overtones of romance. It is replaced with profound dread at the trap the protagonist has now irrevocably ensnared himself in — the sort of feeling you might get if they had walked into an old shack in the middle of nowhere you knew an ax murderer hid out in. Joe, of course, can’t run away, couldn’t, not from the moment he locks eyes with her dead monkey. He is self-destructive, again in the archetypical Noir way, though through his passivity. The brief sense of free-floating possibility is swiftly replaced with one of crushing inevitability (underscored, of course, by the movie actually beginning with his dead body and flashing back for most the rest.) The smooch is scored with scare chords.

Rats feeding on one of their own in the swimming pool.

Apocalypse Now (1979)

Holy shit.

Musical Accompaniment: Pere Ubu — Heart Of Darkness

Brazil (1985)

Why is it so hard to make a great comedy movie? Oh, sure, there's plenty of stone-cold comedy classics, but they seem to operate in two modes: either they're a great movie that's intermittently funny and may or may not have a larger social critique attached (Modern Times, The Big Lebowski, Groundhog Day again, Dr. Strangelove,) or a hilarious comedy that nonetheless hardly leverages the tremendous potential of cinematic form and tends towards anarchic potshots (Airplane!, Blazing Saddles, Caddyshack, The Jerk, Monty Python & The Holy Grail, and my beloved Marx Brothers movies are hardly even movies, just filmed plays.) I prefer the latter category as a matter of taste, but there's this yawning void for movies that both make the grade as I would judge a non-comedic movie, and are still stuffed to the gills with gags from start to finish. This third category essentially consists of the movies in the Cornetto trilogy (especially The World's End) and Safety Last, to my knowledge.

I was really hoping that Terry Gilliam, with his Monty Python pedigree and his eye for fantastic imagery that's evident from the first few seconds of this film, would be the PERFECT man to make a movie that straddles the two categories. Indeed, for the first bit of the movie, it looks like this may be the case, as it builds up a delicate, precarious balance between screwball slapstick, satire, and elegance — thinking here in particular of the short scene where the breakfast-making machines pour tea on Sam's toast, so when Sam pours sugar into his tea he just drinks a load of sugar and when he tries to eat his toast it flops around uselessly in front of his face — but as the time passes you by, the laugh-out-loud moments diminish to zilch, so that the last leg, and the bulk really, of the movie is beautifully-made plot-driven action-adventure multi-hyphenate romp with a harsh, bitter edge. (Well, maybe I'll find what I'm looking for when I watch Playtime.)

This — not measuring up to my idiosyncratic and admittedly nearly impossible hopes and preconceived standards — is a wholly unfair criticism to make of the movie though, especially when it's a bit of a minor masterpiece regardless. The whole thing is wildly inventive and gorgeous, with an unstoppable momentum impressively extended over two and a half hours.

And sorry about not making a post for watching Eraserhead if you were looking forward to that, but I was at a total loss for words to explain, even summarize, that movie. Same for Apocalypse Now, which was more because it so completely knocked me on my ass and immediately rocketed into my top three favorite movies of all time — I might go back and make a properer post for that one. I hope I'm not getting, like, burnt out on these. I just wish I could be more consistently analytical and insightful for you guys.

The Usual Suspects (1995)

A lot of movies use, and overuse, the blue/orange color scheme, using digital color grading to force everything in the movie into those two categories so it really "pops." Go ahead and Google "blue orange movies" or check out the TV Tropes page right now if you want a billion examples. The Usual Suspects follows in this trend, even though it predates digital color grading. It doesn't just use it to use it, though. No, it uses it with definite intention, because it integrates with its theme. Let's play detective:

During the opening credits, we slowly pan over a large body of water at night. Then, as soon as they are over:

Fwoosh! Let there be light.

We cut over here. What is that? A liquid — more water?

No, you dumbass! This is gasoline. This is firewater. Perhaps this is an early hint that our dichotomies aren't as clear-cut as we think? But wait, there's more! What's this, stopping the fire dead in its tracks?

It's, uh... water.

Back to fire.

Firewater.

Fire.

Kaboom.

So what are we supposed to make of all that? Well, now that we've seen the opening scene (which is a flashforward,) let's get into the plot a little bit. The Usual Suspects, once it's underway, is about bad versus worse, worse being Keyzer Soze, an all-powerful but well-hidden puppetmaster, and the bad, our "heroes," the guys on the cover of the box, who we can safely assume are the Usual Suspects. The man whose face we can see in the opening scene is Dean Keaton, one of the Usual Suspects, and the first action we see him do is him creating fire, though it ultimately consumes him. (Probably.) Likewise, the man whose face we can't see we come to realize is Keyzer Soze, who enters making water.

This motif is maintained throughout the film, even in scenes where there is no water nor fire, but there is blue and orange. The climactic showdown happens on a boat (water) that explodes twice, even! It could have been a train, a plane, or an automobile, but it was a boat. There's also "neutral" scenes, in the framing device police story, which tend towards green if anything.

This severe burn victim (a direct consequence of the opening scene's explosion) is being interrogated for his knowledge about Keyzer Soze, while he is being fed water (well, possibly saline solution) intravenously.

The Usual Suspects burn a police car. Immediately cut to:

Water. (Well, and the twin towers. Never forget.) Even through the very end of the movie:

Keyzer Soze takes care of one of his enemies with water...

... and the Usual Suspects take care of their enemies with fire.

A couple choice quotes:

"Dean Keaton was dead. Did you know that? He died in a fire two years ago. [...] Two people saw Dean Keaton walk into a warehouse he owned just before it blew up. They said he went in to check a leaking gas main."

"News said it's raining in New York." This line is said by one of the Usual Suspects apropos of absolutely nothing at all, tacked on to the end of a scene. It's highly conspicuous.

But in certain spots, the neat dichotomy sorta... breaks down. Here's a triumphant "Keyzer Soze" in front of a great amount of fire:

And here's the Usual Suspects in front of a great amount of water, having suffered a great loss to Keyzer Soze:

It's punctured in a few other spots too. Why? Because, as anyone knows about The Usual Suspects these days knows going in, Keyzer Soze IS Roger "Verbal" Kint, one of the five Usual Suspects on the cover and the narrator for the whole damn story, outside of the opening scene and the framing device. That's why fire, the Usual Suspects' loyal friend, can ultimately be the thing that consumes them. That's why there's water that can burn. It's not actually a dichotomy at all — two sides of the same coin are still just one coin.

Or maybe I'm just reading too much into an early example of blue/orange. One or the other.

Heads-up, I'm not gonna have time to make a post today. But I assure you the movie will be watched, although it's gonna be Jaws and not Fargo. I may circle back around to it tomorrow, depending on how my Schrodinger's Cat situation resolves.

Change of plans, Fargo it is.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

Fuck your screenplay books. Fuck your Hero With A Thousand Faces monomyth, fuck your Syd Field's Screenplay, fuck your The Writer's Journey, triple-fuck your Save The Cat, even fuck the flexible and non-prescriptive Robert McKee Story and Dan Harmon story circle. Fuck Die Hard. Oh, and fuck the five-paragraph essay format they drill into you in high school, while I'm at it. The possibilities of narrative art is more than a formula, more than rules and beats. The audience does not deserve catharsis — it deserves something more.

All that matters is that you have drive. Every scene, every line, should have a function and something to intrigue the viewer — this is the essence of drama. Drive means momentum, that every moment propels the audience forwards. Not necessarily to a conclusion that satisfies the hanging threads of a plot, but certainly in service to a thematic need. The traditional three-act structure how-to books will harp on is merely a functional means to this end, but there are other ways.

It is fascinating that, in this respect at least, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is the most avant-garde film from this month I've seen yet. Yes, granted, it's made by Luis Bunuel, who palled around with Salvador Dali, but when pit against Eraserhead and Naked Lunch the notion seems immediately silly. Eraserhead is a claustrophobic, stilted, unsettling nightmare world, bearing only the slightest resemblance to our own, even on the level of human-to-human interaction, where a woman with mashed potato cheeks crushes giant spermatozoa under her high heels, heads become erasers, and most moments are represented in a highly elliptical symbolic manner instead of straightforwardly. Ultimately, though, we experience an Act I, in which Henry procures a baby, an Act II, in which he is slowly pushed to his limit caring for it, and Act III, in which he murders it. Naked Lunch's plot, or perhaps "plot," about bug typewriters double-crossing secret agents in the Interzone, serves mostly as a distraction, a shell game with transparent cups, really, from the actual STORY, which is William Lee escaping his grief over the accidental murder of his wife into a paranoid, drug-induced hallucinatory world, and when he finally confronts it head-on, the movie ends, resolved, despite the secret agent story not having wrapped up yet.

The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie, on the other hand, despite the appearance of a straightforward tale about well-dressed people acting in sensible ways in equally mannered environments with blandly functional cinematography, is much more structurally adventurous, even downright contemptuous of all notions of story-as-reality. As it teaches us, appearances are more than deceptive, they are deception itself. Take the bishop character, for example. In gardener's clothes, he is rebuffed as a stranger by the bourgeoisie, but returning in his bishop's clothes, they kiss his hand. He explains that he wishes to become a "working bishop," which is like a "working priest," except he's a bishop. Later, a woman comes by requiring a priest to come accept an old, poor man's deathbed penance, and he says he's a priest (not a bishop,) and goes off. But before we take this holy man, the man who has thus far displayed not an ounce of sin nor hypocrisy, at face value, he turns into a more brutal Batman and shoots the old, poor man in the face after he admits to the crime of murdering the priest/bishop's parents. Interesting? Functional? Illuminating about not only the character but human nature in general? Yes, in the extreme! Foreshadowed? Following an arc? Forging a profound change of character in the fires of conflict? Relevant to the goings-on of the rest of the characters on any level beyond the thematic? Forget about it!

The narrative zigs and zags and never settles in — much like its, for lack of a better word, protagonists' journey — before it reveals that the previous scene and God only knows how many of the others were but dreams, not once, not twice, but thrice, saving the last for the very end. Minor characters repeatedly put the central players of the story on pause to tell their life story, as in Kafka's The Castle, where this technique is extended past all sense and repeated ad nauseum until, ultimately, ending mid-sentence right as we are about to be launched into yet another lengthy exposition. But The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is never an unsatisfying film, never seems to aimlessly meander, because every scene stabs at the heart of its themes, functions, intrigues, and gets out before it wears out its welcome, a tricky balancing act.

Breathless (1960)

Breathless strikes me as sort of an anti-Citizen Kane. (Mind you, I consider myself in no way qualified to make that claim, and the enormity and ubiquity of the reference point makes the comparison immediately trite to the point where I can hardly even read it without rolling my eyes, and I wrote the damn sentence!) They are both auteur's debut films, notable for their disproportionate influence and number of innovations, but where Citizen Kane is precisely, immaculately staged, Breathless has a loose, low-budget DIY feel and is possibly (probably, even) improvised, shot on location, using only natural light. Citizen Kane attempts to condense an old man's entire life into 2 hours, Breathless extends a meandering, aimless afternoon in a hotel room past all sense and relevance (sacrificing the "drive" I so worshiped last entry.) Citizen Kane marks the beginning of cinema's mature, classic period, Breathless (I've read) marks its end, and the beginning of the next era, a postmodernist one reflexively aware of how it slots into the tradition of film and culture and chock full of references and contradictions to such.

Befitting this theme, it is enamored with reflection:

In the glasses.


The real deal.

A pity that such an important film is... kinda a mess. It aimlessly meanders — contrast with Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, which POINTEDLY meanders — content to listlessly proceed through gangster film cliches it can hardly even summon the energy to lampshade, much less supply evocative character motivation. Not to throw shade, but it considers its plot a nuisance that gets in the way of cultivating an atmosphere of breezy, intellectual (or, in parts, pseudo-intellectual) cool. It's strange that Godard, consummate film-critic with over a thousand watched under his belt before he even touched a camera, would angle to create with his debut film (with no money, but endless creative freedom) a mediocre film noir when he doesn't seem even halfway invigorated by the concept. Perhaps that's just the way of the french, though.

I happen to know for a fact Jean-Luc Godard would go on to make more interesting, thought-provoking films in the future, though, and the experimental innovations and spirit contained within Breathless is inspiring enough to garner optimism about checking out other films of the French New Wave, if they can follow through.

Jaws (1975)

Hey, did you notice that in Jaws, there are exactly two split-focus diopter lens shots?

See how it gets real blurry on his hair and shoulder?

This one doesn't need to focus on something far away, just a thin fishing wire that would have disappeared if you kept Brody's head in focus.

Young directors and their expensive toys!

The Conversation (1974)

Here, watch the opening shot, preferably in full screen:

It’s a video Where’s Waldo where you don’t know who Waldo is. There’s so much noise there might as well be no signal. Gradually, though, the camera hones in, first on a mime, then on a man in grey. Still, though, we know nothing of any of these people.

The Conversation, unlike Francis Ford Coppola’s other three 1970s films (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and I’m going to go ahead and assume The Godfather Part II) does not have a grand, epic sweep to it. It does not attempt to recreate a lifetime or an entire war. Rather, it spends its whole runtime trapped in this one moment, backtracking and analyzing, searching through the muck for the important bits, peeling back the layers only for our protagonist to find that in doing so they’ve made their whole world smaller, more claustrophobic. Contrast with the similar opening wedding scene from his previous film, The Godfather, which has roughly the same amount of chaos and moving bodies, but clears everything up very shortly, using it as a gathering of the characters who will be relevant to the rest of the story so they can be introduced.

By putting us in this lost, analytical position from the first shot, it puts us in the same headspace as the main character, and primes us for the rest of the movie, which does not fail to follow through on the opening shot’s promise. That, not just its own merits, is why this is one of the greatest opening shots of all time.

Oh, also, there’s one bit later on where Harry is talking to a girl in a green dress just outside of his so-to-speak office. Instead of just cutting from one face, to the other, with the other person’s head blurrily intruding on the furthest left or right side of the screen, and then intermittently to a shot that shows the both of them in profile, as “coverage” would dictate so the scene can be built in the edit bay, the camera starts facing the woman in green, then swings to face Harry. Then, it jump cuts back to the starting position where it’s facing the woman in green, and swings at the same slow speed to face Harry AGAIN. It does this three, maybe four times in a row. I’d have some screencaps, but it exists in motion, and there’s no videos of it online. But if you’re going to watch the movie, keep a look out for that, ‘cause it’s neat to notice when it happens.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

[02:17:31] <Chwoka> AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA WHAT THE SHIT
[02:17:37] <Chwoka> WHAT THE SHIT WAS THAT
[02:17:40] <isoraqathedh> ?
[02:17:41] <Chwoka> THAT WAS AMAZING
[02:17:49] <Chwoka> 2001: a space oddessy, iso
[02:18:02] <isoraqathedh> Oh, that movie?
[02:18:06] <Chwoka> yes!
[02:18:18] <Chwoka> oh my god! what in the fucking world!
[02:18:26] <isoraqathedh> Okay.
[02:18:34] <isoraqathedh> Don't know where that reaction came to be.
[02:18:48] <Chwoka> i just finished watching it
[02:18:57] <Chwoka> and it was... a mindmelter
[02:19:16] <Chwoka> it's like nothing else, ever
[02:20:34] <Chwoka> i mean i knew about the hal 9000 plot which is the most easily-grasped element, and i knew it started with that famous match cut of bone to space ship and ended with a wall of lights then space fetus
[02:20:59] <Chwoka> it's the least economical movie ever made, it seems! and i mean that in both senses of the word
[02:22:17] <Chwoka> a, it luxuriates in drawing out moments for as long as possible, so the beauty of the cinematography and soundtrack and the... the gravity can truly sink in
[02:22:49] <Chwoka> b, it looks so fucking expensive, even when you can tell most of the exterior shots of spaceships are paper cut-outs
[02:24:34] <Chwoka> and they did it all in 1968!
[02:24:42] <Chwoka> no digital ANYTHING
[02:25:18] <Chwoka> and it was fully funded and released by a major studio
[02:25:20] <Sanzh> stanley kubrick goes hard when it comes to film
[02:26:00] <isoraqathedh> It shows how much movie magic has come.
[02:26:18] <isoraqathedh> In fact I think this was part of the argument about how faking the moon landing is impossible, short of going to the moon to film the fake moon landing.
[02:26:27] <isoraqathedh> (on the moon)
[02:28:05] <Chwoka> no, kubrick did a pretty good job, other than missing just how little gravity there was on the moon so everyone just walked around all normal-like
[02:28:22] <Chwoka> more than pretty good. other than the paper cut-outs: totally convincing
[02:28:30] <isoraqathedh> Yeah, but you can still tell it was fake via the paper cut-outs and all.
[02:29:02] <isoraqathedh> Whereas nowadays if it wasn't for the fact that giant robots are not a thing you wouldn't be able to tell what is fake and what is real.
[02:29:16] <Chwoka> only in some shots, there was one landing scene with a full (full-size???) model lander that was utterly convincing
[02:29:39] <Chwoka> i'm not saying the moon landing was faked, because i know for a personal fact it wasn't
[02:29:45] <isoraqathedh> (i.e. if you randomly pluck someone from birth and held him in a cell Truman Show style for twenty years with no input on what is real and what is not, and then you plonked him to that movie, he won't be able to figure out that it was fake.)
[02:29:52] <Chwoka> i'm saying kubrick was a GENIUS
[02:30:09] <isoraqathedh> Yes, I take that.
[02:31:03] <Chwoka> beyond the spectacle, though... the subject matter is so oblique, in a delightful way
[02:32:08] <Chwoka> there's really nothing to say about it because it's kept all as a mystery, other than some murmuring about extraterrestial life
[02:32:37] <Chwoka> all the better to enhance the awe of the spectacle, which might strike some as "cheap," but see above, NOTHING about this movie is cheap
[02:33:58] <Sanzh> chwoka you might enjoy interstellar
[02:34:12] <Sanzh> or 2001 2: electric boogaloo
[02:36:37] <Chwoka> i think the next stop here is the holy mountain, tbh
[02:37:52] <Chwoka> what i expected from 2001 was, like... 5 minutes dawn of man, 10 minutes trippy ending sequence, 95 minutes taut psychological thriller about an astronaut vs. an ai, or something like that
[02:39:19] <Chwoka> and what i got is something with more ambition and more total disregard for comprehensibility than any film i've seen yet instead
[02:40:04] <Chwoka> this is a month i've also seen eraserhead and apocalypse now, mind!
[02:42:13] <Sanzh> hahaha

Star Wars (1977)

Musical Accompaniment: DJ Z-Trip & DJ P — Track 13 (It's a blank title)

I made the mistake of telling Darth Legos (via Skype — text, he doesn't like voice chat) that I was going to be watching Star Wars for the first time on July 30th.

"You've never seen Star Wars™?! Oh boy, you are in for a RIDE! Prepare to engage in the greatest movie of all time!" he replied back.

"thanks dude"

"Wait, you gotta watch the one that's called Episode IV first. That's actually the first one."

"why would i watch episode 4 first, that's fucked up, i wanna start at the start," I replied. I did already know the whole prequels thing, but I'm a jerk. Or maybe I'm the nicest man ever, giving him the perfect chance to satisfy himself by unloading all of his complicated prequel opinions on the ever-rarer downright-mythical virgin Star Wars viewer. He liked it, I could tell.

"First of all, as if experiencing something in the true chronological order wasn’t of paramount importance,” he began, without finishing the sentence, really.
“That’s the way they experienced them back in the day, and that in my marathon-honed opinion is the only true way to go about it now, outside of the realm of experimental viewings. Trust me, your life will be enriched if you do this the right way, while deviation can lead to nothing but baleful unappreciation.
Second of all, I hope you’re mentally prepared for the media-whiplash of a lifetime. If you end up caring about Star Wars™ even one tenth as much as you really ought to, that prequel trilogy will screw your brain up in about nine different ways, and I’ll bet my last Tatooinian druggat you’d be cursing George Walton Lucas Jr. with one breath, praising him in the next, and asking your childhood to show you on the doll where he touched it with the third, but at the end of the day, trust me, it’ll be worth it."

"okay dude, okay!" I said at the conclusion, or what I made the conclusion. "i'll watch episode 4 first. should i have watched the godfather part III before I too?"

"I've never seen The Godfather," said he, "I'll have to get back to you on that."

That was a little over two weeks ago. Today, I woke up and immediately began my movie-watching ritual: popcorn, coffee, and some era-appropriate music. But in the middle of a full-body disco workout, replete with thumb gestures, in sync to the irresistible musical concoction that is Heatwave's 1977 hit "Grooveline," my door swung open.

Uninvited, Darth Legos had taken it upon himself, that very day after our conversation apparently, to take a trip to my house and accompany me on my quote-unquote "maiden voyage into the galactic epic of Wars in the Stars." (Sounds more exciting than Dancing with them, at least.) He was wearing a too-large Darth Vader mask and he wouldn't take it off for any reason.

"July the 30th be with you! What edition are you gonna use?"

"Edition," said I, in upper-case now because I'm actually speaking.

"Like... the laserdisc one is pretty good!"

"Laserdisc?" I laughed. "How the fuck would I have a Laserdisc player? You've been hanging around Walter's too much. I was just gonna use my dad's old VHS —"

"NNNNOO!" Darth Legos howled, ripping the VHS tape from my hand and then tearing the magnetic tape out with his fingers and teeth, lifting up the mask a little to do so even.

"What the fuck, dude!?"

"This... this is why you need me, see?" he said, panting. "You poor, lost soul." He curbstomped the tape up against a wall. "Here," he said, "We'll watch it on my computer." He whipped it out. It was both sticky and covered with stickers — probably a Dell, that just feels right for some reason, but you couldn't tell for the sticker of Lego Darth Vader's helmet covering the logo. "Like my casemod?" He didn't wait for my answer. "We're gonna watch Harmy's Despecialized Edition! You can watch all the other versions later, but watch this one first. All the quality of blu-ray, all the low-fi special effects of the original 35mm! And rest assured: Han shoots first."

"Who's Han? The camera guy?" Again, I knew, but I'm a jerk. As the movie began to roll immediately after this comment, his eyes were not fixated on the text scroll, but on me, with a mixture of contempt and awe.

I don't really like watching movies with friends, because I often end up focused more on their reactions than the film, and this was never more true than shoulder-to-shoulder with Darth Legos, who was lipsyncing along to every line, rocking back and forth, and vibrating with excitement at the first appearances of characters like Vader and Han Solo.

"So," I recall asking somewhere during the first fifteen minutes of the movie, "It's a whole film franchise about these two gay robots?"

"They're not gay!" he said. "I mean, not that there's anything wrong with that, but they're not gay. They're robots, they can't be. And they're not robots, they're droids."

"...Not gay, more like bot gay," I said.

"They're just friends."

Then there was blessed silence from him, broken up only by a brief sequence of mimed choking noises, for around 30 minutes more until the cantina. "That's Chewbacca!" he said. "Like you!"

"Like me? I shaved today."

"No, Chewbacca, like your name sounds! Chwakka!"

"It's not PRONOUNCED LIKE THAT!" I put my fist through an empty fish tank and roared.

"Wow, that's a really good impersonation!"

"SHUT UP! HARD 'O'! HARD 'O'!"

For the next 15 minutes I sobbed in the bathroom, wrapping my bloody fist in ACE™ bandages. I came back just in time for Obi-Wan to say "that's no moon."

"You didn't pause it?" I said.

"You don't pause Star Wars, MOM!" he said. "I mean, Chw... Chw... Will."

I sighed. "Well, what did I miss?"

"They got Han Solo to take them to Alderaan, but by then Lord Vader had had it obliterated with the Death Star’s Concave Dish Composite Beam Superlaser."

"Could we rewind?"

"No. We must proceed chronologically not only through the series, but the movie itself. You're supposed to like movies, surely you understand the value of experiencing it in the linear time it was meant to be experienced in."

"We're not doing the whole series, I have work in a couple hours."

"...Tomorrow?"'

"I'm watching Drive tomorrow."

"Then how about the next day?"

"You're not crashing at my place for two days," I said.

Then, a tenser silence through the infiltration sequence, which was legitimately gripping without the interruptions. It was me who broke it, this time: "So, this Han Solo guy, they really put the cameraman in the film?" I'm a real jerk.

"No, no! That's Harrison Ford!"

"Who?"

"Indiana Jones!"

"Never seen those either."

"Were you ever a kid?!"

I shook my head.

"Blade Runner?"

"Oh, yeah, that was a great movie! Better than this one. So far."

Silence.

"Hey, he was in The Conversation too!"

He began to cry. But in all fairness, that was probably because Obi-Wan died.

"Those helmets, they're kinda like the ones in Spaceballs, aren't they?"

"You've seen that wretched garbage, but not Star Wars™?"

"Yeah, most of it. Comedy Central reruns were on a lot in my house. You know, a lot about this movie reminds me of Spaceballs, actually."

"That's because Spaceballs was a parody — and I hesitate to defile the word by associating it with that mangled, mirthless horrorshow of a movie! If you want a lighter take on the Star Wars™ mythos, next time I highly recommend the various installments of LEGO™ Star Wars™."

"Would you? I'll take that into consideration then."

Finally, the credits came up: "Written and Directed by GEORGE LUCAS."

"There an after-the-credits sequence?"

"No," he said. "So, what did you think!?" the childlike enthusiasm that I had managed to steadily deplete came rushing back in one instant.

"I don't really like to rank movies, you know, pit 'em against each other like they're gladiators."

"The only thing you can pit it against are the other Star Wars movies!"

"I mean, it was good, I mean, but like all the movies on my list are. It can't be compared to, like, Apocalypse Now, Discreet Charm, you know, the real grand, aspirational masterpieces, but it was a fun little action adventure movie, you know? Don't see why it inspires the devotion it does, though."

He just stared at me.

"You wanna stay for dinner? I've got a great taco recipe."

"No! No I do NOT wish to remain in this household for your heathen 'tacos!' I never thought I would have a bad time watching Star Wars™, but here we are! You are the living end, William J. Chwakka."

"IT'S PRONOUNCED 'CHWOKA!'" I screamed, throwing his laptop at him. "HARD 'O'! AND YOU SAY TACO WEIRD TOO! 'Tay-co,' 'tay-co,' 'tay-co,' HAVEN'T YOU EVER HEARD THAT WORD IN YOUR LIFE! GET OUT!"

I looked in his eyes as he slowly gathered his things and began to walk backwards. The telltale whirring of the air conditioner that had been our constant companion during the silent stretches of the stop-and-start conversation suddenly stopped.

"Oh, great!" I said. "You hear that? Now the air conditioner's out too. And tomorrow's supposed to be the hottest day of the year! 106 degrees, Fahrenheit! Might as well measure it in Kelvin! And it's all your fault!"

"My fault? MY fault? That air conditioner abandoned you, because it found your lack of faith disturbing. It wants you to bake like on the deserts of Tatooine." He opened the door. "Good riddance, and may the force NOT be with you." He went through the door and slammed it behind him, then opened it again and peeked through. "You've made a mortal enemy today!" He slammed it again.

What a jerk.

Special thanks to Lt. Fish for use of Darth Legos and some of the dialogue.