The Last Jedi

The Last Jedi is a beautiful empty thing that follows a similar template to its predecessor, The Force Awakens: a band of plucky rebels attempt to stymie a new imperial threat while old favourites from the original trilogy are added to warm the hearts of older fans.  But unlike TFA, this film lacks the brio and momentum provided by JJ Abrams’s direction as well as its surprise elements (the new villains, the new masks, the new lightsabres, the stormtrooper turned hero subplot, the Han and Leia family issues). The Last Jedi is a flabby affair that needed some ruthless editing – there is too much aerial footage of Skellig Michael; there’s a section set on an intergalactic version of Las Vegas that seems to have been included to show off CGI technology rather than advance the plot; and at least three endings. There is also too much Carrie Fisher, who really doesn’t seem match fit and too much Mark Hamill, the inclusion of whom feels like a victory for sentiment over storytelling: they are there to appease fans rather than advance the plot. Remove the film from the canon and you would wonder why any director would want to spend so much time lingering on these two characters. 

                As pretty as The Last Jedi inevitably looks, the villains seem more underpowered than ever before. Maybe it’s partly due to Po Dameron’s baiting of him in the opening scene, but Domhnall Gleeson is a watery, dweebish imperial commander and his accent and bearing are reminiscent of an antagonist in a school play. Adam Driver, so good in Paterson, is just too much like a sad sack bloodhound to be a convincing bad guy and why bother making Andy Serkis into dent-headed skull creature when there are few scarier actors than Andy Serkis himself? 

                Daisy Ridley and John Boyega put in solid turns but they are not given the scope they had in Force Awakens when they were allowed be funny and moving. Instead, the spotlight is turned on the veterans Hamill and Fisher, who were never much good in their roles.

                As ever with blockbusters, you are left wondering about the behind-the-scenes machinations, the compromises that billion-dollar franchises inevitably force film-makers to make to keep the fans happy, to secure marketing deals, to win over audiences across the world.  After all, this is as much about maintaining the integrity of a brand and selling merchandise as it is about telling a story, hence this slavishly conservative film that is aimed, like all of the Star Wars films, at children but is desperately trying to keep its nostalgic older viewers satisfied. 

                Watching The Last Jedi you always feel aware that it is one segment of an enormous business, a unit that is there is help keep the merchandising juggernaut ticking along.  

Review: Starman by Paul Trynka

More than any other rock star, David Bowie was intent on writing his own story, and fostering his legend, through his careful control of his musical output and image.  Starman, Paul Trynka’s unfussy 2011 biography gets behind the mystery and presents him as a cultural sponge whose lack of natural musical talent was compensated for by a genius for marrying styles and for coming up with grand concepts.

The book records a life packed with incident and activity, detailing the various false starts of the 1960s, his eventual ‘sudden’ emergence as icon and innovator in 1972, the frequently addled years of super-charged creativity that characterised the rest of that decade, the moribund eighties, the reinvigorated nineties, the more reclusive domestic years of the new millennium and the late creative and commercial resurgence in the three years prior to his final disappearance.

                There is a lot of fascinating  material in this compulsively readable book which creates a beguiling picture of an intellectually restless and ferociously driven individual who, in common with many great artists, was addicted to taking risks, to following impulses (and to taking the ‘contrary’ action) and who tended the get phenomenal results from his various collaborators.

 Trynka gives credit to Mick Ronson for fuelling the sound that made him a major star, to Tony Visconti’s production wizardry on his most daring records, to ex-wife Angie for helping a reluctant Bowie to go for broke with his extraordinary image in the early to mid-1970s. Brian Eno, Nile Rodgers, Carlos Alomar, Mike Garson, the other Spiders and manager Tony de Fries are also given their dues. While many musicians feel they were not properly acknowledged for their input into his greatest recordings, Trynka does make the fair observation that few of them produced anything as interesting without Bowie’s encouragement and the experimental atmosphere he created in studio. And there is much made of his successful role in helping to rehabilitate the careers of Lou Reed and especially Iggy Pop, whose chaotic 1980s provides an intriguing counterpoint to the carefully-planned and tightly-controlled world of Bowie at the same time.        

               His hunger for success and artistic experimentation is complemented by a hunger for physical gratification in the form of sex, cigarettes, coffee, cocaine and alcohol and like so many successful people, one is left marvelling at his physical strength. There are moments when he appears to teeter on the brink of mental collapse (a period spent holed up in L.A. with cocaine paranoia in 1975 is perhaps the nadir) but unlike many others is able to haul himself up and move onto the next project. 

                Like all human beings, he is a complex and it will take years before a genuinely definitive biography will be written about him, and Trynka gives him the benefit of the doubt whenever some contentious issue emerges such as his aunt’s accusation that he neglected his mentally unstable step-brother, his long-term falling out with Iggy Pop, his ex-wife Angie’s scornful remarks about his behaviour, his refusal to play at the Mick Ronson tribute concert, his sometimes cruel dismissal of musical partners (often attributed to drug problems),  and his early embrace of the type of security entourage that became de rigeur for  superstar musicians in the 1980s. It’s possible that Trynka, a working journalist, hoping someday for an interview with his reclusive subject, decided that it might be in his favour to be even-handed in his approach.  The last two chapters of the revised edition, written shortly after Bowie’s death, in which Trynka gives a brief account of his re-emergence from domestic semi-retirement with two acclaimed albums before dying, feel understandably rushed, – there will be much more to say about this extraordinary late period in which the artist embarked on one final act of self-mythologising.