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The Battle of Yavin, as written by Biggs Darklighter

Posted on by Beau Dure

The Rebellion was on its last legs, thanks to the blundering of the incompetent Princess Leia, who led the Death Star straight to the Rebel base.

Only the bravery and skill of the great Biggs Darklighter could stop the Empire now. He knew the top brass had drawn up a ridiculous plan to have a handful of fighters zip through a heavily guarded trench instead of flying straight for the thermal exhaust port that was the key to destroying this monstrous space station.

His fellow fighters would be no help. Porkins’ girth guaranteed a fatal gravitational pull once they approached the Death Star. Other pilots had clearly slept through the briefing or were busy wondering what Princess Leia would look like in a metal bikini.

“Look at the size of that thing,” said Wedge Antilles.

“Ignore him,” thought Biggs. “Maybe he’ll be a useful decoy for a few seconds.”

The biggest problem, Biggs knew, was the kid he knew from Tatooine — Luke Skywalker. He immediately regretted vouching for Luke’s abilities back at the base when the reckless hillbilly blew up a cannon tower at such close range that he flew through the explosion.

“Not so hot without that creepy Kenobi guy, are you?” Biggs muttered to himself.

The attack was already running into trouble. Porkins, as expected, reported some sort of problem.

“Eject!” Biggs exclaimed.

Biggs immediately shook his head at his own ridiculous suggestion. Eject? To where? A one-man commando raid on the surface of the Death Star? Jek Porkins, Space Ninja. The stress of the situation was getting to him.

Fortunately, the Death Star had scrambled some TIE fighters, giving Biggs a chance to do what he did best — blast those poorly designed ships that exploded into a million pieces at the slightest touch from a hot laser.

While Biggs engaged a whole squadron of fighters, his neighbor from Tatooine kept making the battle all about himself.

“Blast it, Biggs, where are you?” Luke whined.

Biggs rolled his eyes as he blew up another TIE fighter. Hard to believe this kid was banging the princess.

The battle just got worse. Biggs had warned the generals of the futility of sending three fighters at a time down a long trench while the rest of the fleet sat idly “out of range” instead of picking off the TIE fighters who gleefully hopped in behind them.

Gold Leader led the first attack wave and didn’t even get a shot off. Red Leader, the Rebels’ second-best fighter after Biggs, let loose a promising “It’s away!” as he fired at the target, but the shot impacted on the surface.

“Maybe it’s time to bail,” Biggs thought. The X-wings had surprising interplanetary range. He could fly to Dagobah or Alderaan — oops, maybe not Alderaan.

“We’re going in full throttle,” Luke said. “It’ll be just like Beggar’s Canyon back home.”

Against his better judgment, Biggs hopped in the trench with Luke and Wedge.

“We’ll stay far enough back to cover you,” Biggs said.

Not that the X-wings could “cover” anyone. No one ever thought to put a rear-facing gun on these things.

“I’m hit!” Wedge yelled. “I can’t stay with you.”

“Get clear, Wedge,” Luke said. “You can’t do any more good back there.”

Biggs had enough. Wedge gets a little boo-boo on his X-wing, and suddenly he can’t play human shield?

And even though Luke said they’d go “full throttle” to keep the fighters off their backs, the TIE fighters were once again gaining on them. “Like Beggar’s Canyon,” Luke said, as if they were facing Jawas instead of the might of the Empire.

“Time to dance,” Biggs thought. Side to side, up and down. The TIE fighters couldn’t get a lock on him.

Luke, on the other hand, was flying in a straight line. Just as he turned off his targeting computer for some reason, the TIE fighters realized they could pick him off.

Boom.

“Too bad, flyboy,” Biggs thought. “All up to me.”

With the skill that he alone possessed, Biggs evaded the fire from all sides and launched his photon torpedoes.

Down the hatch. Time to blow this joint.

On his way back to base, Biggs passed the Millennium Falcon going the other direction.

“Turn around, you dumbass,” Biggs said.

Too late. The smuggling ship flew right into the Death Star’s blast wave. Hunk of junk, indeed.

Back at base, the rebels swarmed Biggs’ X-wing. Finally, the fighter who had saved their lazy asses — again — would get the respect he was due.

In the days that followed, the Empire surrendered to the rebels. Biggs moved to a luxury apartment on Coruscant and pledged to rule the galaxy with a gentle hand, ushering in a new era of peace and love.

Best of all, there was no more talk of this “Force.” Leia occasionally had some dreams in which a wrinkled green dude said something like “restore balance you must,” but she got through it with therapy. A bunch of people on Tatooine reported a sudden ability to lift objects with their minds, but doctors on Bespin, thriving on funding from Lando Calrissian, found a vaccine for Midichlorian Disease. The galaxy would no longer be caught in the crossfire between a bunch of guys flipping between “dark” and “light.”

The “star wars” were over.

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The subtle and not-so-subtle brilliance of “Repo Man”

Posted on by Beau Dure

Repo Man is, by any measure, an odd film.

You have a Chevy Malibu with a MacGuffin — much like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction years later — that vaporizes those who look at it.

You have a gang of punks who talk a great game but are basically incompetent and petty.

“Just for that, you’re not in the gang any more!”

“Duke, let’s go do some crimes.” “Yeah! Let’s go get sushi and not pay!”

You have Harry Dean Stanton taking his role of a repo man even more seriously than Cliff Clavin took his role as a mailman.

You have a bunch of strange, loose narrative threads about a televangelist and shadowy government agents.

And it all hinges on a young Emilio Estevez as Otto, who finds a lifeline out of parental abandonment and economic despair by taking a job that pulls him into a world that grows more surreal as the movie proceeds.

It’s hilarious.

But did you know you were watching a commentary on the punk scene, urban decay, religion, capitalism and nuclear war? No?

Watch all 40-plus minutes here:

The video points out some subtleties in the film, especially the setting of a Los Angeles that is very much on the periphery of the glitzy parts. (And yet also not Compton, which isn’t mentioned here. The scenes in Repo Man take place in an L.A. that is simply forgotten, for better or for worse.)

It also has some interesting behind-the-scenes trivia that explains a few of the film’s eccentricities. Some of the narrative threads that don’t go anywhere are the result of studio intervention, especially about the ending. (The person who had to convey that intervention was one of the film’s backers, Michael Nesmith. Yes, that Michael Nesmith. He’s led an interesting life beyond his time as one of the Monkees.)

The debatable part of the video is the theory about the mad scientist J. Frank Parnell and the Chevy Malibu. The video suggests Parnell himself is an alien. At face value, that theory doesn’t hold up because Parnell gives a much more plausible background story:

You ever hear of the neutron bomb? Destroys people — leaves buildings standing. Fits in a suitcase. It’s so small, no one knows it’s there until — BLAMMO. Eyes melt, skin explodes, everybody dead. So immoral, working on the thing can drive you mad.

But the face-value reading doesn’t explain everything. There’s a connection between Parnell and the UFO cultists, one of whom becomes Otto’s sort-of girlfriend. The Malibu is indeed a spacecraft, as we see at the end. (That said, we learn in this video that the ending we see is not the ending director Alex Cox originally intended.)

So maybe Parnell isn’t describing himself when he talks about going mad. Maybe he really is an alien who befriended one of the scientists at one of those scary New Mexico locations. But then why would Parnell succumb to the radiation in what would presumably be his own spacecraft? Maybe they tested the neutron bomb near him, and he initially survived but suffered a lethal does of radiation poisoning?

Anyway, it’s all fun to discuss.

Another possible theory not mentioned here: Is Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) meant to be Jesus? He sacrifices himself at the end, though it’s rather pointless. And when he leaves his hospital bed, the televangelist’s voice is heard exclaiming, “He is risen!” Perhaps that’s not just a throwaway gag. And yes, a religion student has suggested just that.

The video messes up one point here: The relationship between Otto and Leila is anything but stable. Sure, maybe Leila was conflicted when the government agent came in to torture Otto, but there’s little indication that Otto sees her as anything other than a frenemy with benefits, and Leila doesn’t seem to see him as a steady boyfriend, either. It’s only at the end, when Leila is pissed off that Otto is getting called to ride the Malibu to parts unknown, that she throws in the word “relationship.”

That exchange is included in a roll of funny moments from the film:

“What about our relationship?”

“What?”

“Our relationship!”

“Fuck that!”

But it omits Leila’s last line, one of the best in a film with a lot of great ones: “You SHITHEAD! I’m glad I tortured you!”

So yes, it’s silly. But it’s also a wonderful work of art. Like The Young Ones, a British TV show of the same early-80s era, it finds humor in grim reality and adds a dose of the absurd. They also have great music.

Watch the video. But maybe watch the film first.

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Sex on the big screen — no, not Game of Thrones on your 65-inch HD in the basement

Posted on by Beau Dure

Murder! Guns! Graphic war scenes! A man tenderly running his hand …

Whoa, whoa! We can’t let our kids see that!

Our sensibilities about sex and violence have always been a bit hypocritical. Jamie Lee Curtis taking off her top in Trading Places? That’s an R rating. A film strewn with death? Today, PG-13. In the old days, just PG. Even the original Star Wars had a high death toll, though it was just rebel pilots vaporizing or stormtroopers doing the Wilhelm scream.

Meanwhile, on cable, language restrictions are completely out the window, and some people even have s-e-x. As someone who jumped on the Game of Thrones very late in the show’s run, I started to wonder if part of the appeal was that people got naked. Very naked.

From Saturday Night Live:

Emilia Clarke: Remember when we had sex in Season 6?

Kit Harington: Yes, I do.

Clarke: Did you know they filmed that?

Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday is wondering when moviemakers will catch up.

To be sure, there’s precious little to mourn in the death of the kind of ogling soft-core wish-fulfillment fantasies that male directors foisted on viewers for nearly a century. But is abstinence really our only option? With young filmmakers being co-opted by the Disney-Marvel complex, and with millennials and Generation Z reportedly having less sex than their predecessors, the new chastity on screen feels like a prudent but not entirely welcome new normal.

And it’s better than having kids learn about sex from porn.

(Yes, this clip is very explicit.)

This entry was posted in movies, tv and tagged pornography. Bookmark the permalink.

Originally published at https://mostlymodernmedia.wordpress.com on June 10, 2019. That’s my other non-sports blog. It’s sometimes a little more cynical than Before the Apocalypse.

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comedy, movies

Why “Cars” is underrated

Posted on by Beau Dure

The June issue of Wired has a snarky take on Cars and its merchandising (p. 112 – doesn’t appear to be online).

The toys are hot sellers, of course. Of the film, writer Neal Pollack says:

Cars, which is essentially an animated automotive Doc Hollywood, doesn’t quite hold up against Pixar’s Oscar-winning blockbusters like Up and Wall-E, or even the Toy Story series.

For sheer artistic heft, sure, Wall-E is a grander achievement than Cars. But I’m drawing the line at the Toy Story series for a simple reason: Cars is less maudlin than most kids films.

We know the basic formula — the protagonists are separated from loved ones and either work their way back (2 1/2 of the Toy Story films, Finding Nemo) or complete the circle of life (Bambi, The Lion King). The films either pull successfully at your heartstrings, skate through the drama in lighthearted fashion (the equally underrated The Aristocats) or sink in a dreary mess (Dinosaur).

Cars is a welcome change. We aren’t driven to tears by Lightning McQueen’s disappearance. We’re saddened to learn how lonely Radiator Springs has become, but it’s no reason to be despondent. The drama comes from the humbling change in Lightning McQueen’s life.

So Cars is less likely to make your toddler (or worse, the parents) weep. That doesn’t mean it’s flimsier fare. If you’re looking for educational value, the messages of humility and community in Cars are a bit better than “Hold on to your toys or they’ll be really sad!”

And the lack of emotional trauma means you can watch the film again. And again. And again. And … maybe that’s a little much. But it’s certainly more than you could stand with one of the Toy Story films.

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tv

It’s a MOVIE!!

Posted on by Beau Dure

Memo to political candidates: Apparently, referencing the great Steve Martin movie The Jerk will get you in a lot of trouble, even if it seems fairly obvious from the context that you’re doing nothing other than referencing the movie.

Here’s the … sigh … story.

In other sort-of Steve Martin-related news, the Anne Hathaway episode of Saturday Night Live was fantastic. The political humor, I expected — the rest, no.

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