Friday, December 15, 2017

Loophole

Today Star Wars: The Last Jedi opens and the world has something more than it probably realizes. There's no over-estimating the influence the original trilogy had on my formative years and I'm pleased as hell to be going to see new and good chapters as they're added (man, did I dig Rogue One - a lot better than The Force Awakens for my money), but what the world probably doesn't realize it has today - a much more finite resource has just been spent - a new Rian Johnson movie. The dude who gave us Looper and Brick (and yeah, The Brothers Bloom) has spent years of his creative juice on this flick, as well as a rumored entire spin-off trilogy and that's... a little frightening.

While I'm hoping and guessing it means we get an extra-good Star Wars entry, I'm afraid that we get one less uniquely Johnson-esque picture or three or more in the future.

I enjoy a lot of the big franchise pictures, but man when I ask myself which I'd rather have happen - a Brett Ratner Star Wars and a Rian Johnson original or the other way around - sheeeeit, I'll take it the other way please.

It's happened before... I mean George Lucas did me a huge solid with creating the thing in the first place, but when I look back at his filmography and ask myself would I rather have had him spend decades on tinkering with special editions of the trilogy and the prequel trilogy or maybe work on another THX-1138 or even American Graffiti... it's no contest.

And now there's talk (maybe it's a joke... it's a joke, right?) about Quentin Tarantino doing a Star Trek movie, and Martin Scorsese making a Joker origin picture for the DCU? Things that as a franchise fan might sound fun at first quickly turn to nervous chuckles when you consider the pace of their output and their mortality.

I mean, did we dodge a bullet with David Lynch not doing Return of the Jedi (something I'd actually love to have seen - as much as I enjoy Dune I'd love to have seen his Jabba the Hutt sequence)? Or Darren Aronofsky's Batman? Edgar Wright's Ant Man?

I do think James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy is possibly his best work as well as something special and personalized injected into the MCU and Taika Waititi's Thor: Ragnarok sounds like it may be as well, but I hope these are launchpads for funding of their future projects rather than their permanent residence for the next decade.

I was hoping Sam Raimi's turn doing Spider-Man was going to infuse a huge franchise with a weird sensibility, but... not so much. I do think it worked for Tim Burton's Batman and especially Batman Returns, which incidentally is one of my favorite Christmas movies.

Anyway, happy happy, everybody.

We'll always have Looper.

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