August 2019 – Nik Dirga

Wrestling with being a “Star Wars” fan at age 47

I’m a fan of a lot of things. But “Star Wars” is complicated for me.

Like pretty much everyone born in the 1970s, I grew up with “Star Wars,” surrounded by Kenner action figures and C-3PO Underoos and painstakingly assembling the entire 107-issue run of Marvel comics. I never thought I’d still be seeing new “Star Wars” movies 40 years later.

But these days, the more toxic elements of “Star Wars” fandom have seeped into my appreciation of the Jedi mythos, already diluted by middling prequels and a never-ending tsunami of content-expanding product – some good, some unnecessary. They’re a tiny keyboard warrior minority, but seeing the misogynists and trolls outraged at gerrrrrls and non-white characters brought into their little biosphere in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” had a contaminating effect for me. I’ll always love “Star Wars,” but I’m uneasy lumping myself into the fandom scene.

Jake Lloyd and Ahmed Best of 1999’s “The Phantom Menace” have faced years of harassment and bullying for simply appearing in a movie. It’s hard for me to square up my own childhood Jedi fandom with an invisible online world of real-life Sith lords throwing bombs from their keyboards. If fandom is hounding an Asian-American actress off the internet for being in a “Star Wars” movie, I don’t want any part of it.

So it’s complicated watching “Star Wars” movies in your late 40s, with a lifetime of your own memory baggage tossed into a cultural Tower of Babel of hot takes and trolling that never ends.

I watched “The Last Jedi” again recently, and it’s the rare post-1983 “Star Wars” movie that actually gets better on each viewing. It goes in hard, unexpected places and objectively speaking is the most beautiful movie of the entire series to date, with director Rian Johnson composing painterly, stunning vistas that remind me of why I fell in love with the alien skies of Tatooine and Bespin in the first place. The cast is great (sorry, keyboard warriors) and it’s honestly the most surprising “Star Wars” movie since “Empire Strikes Back.” While I dug “The Force Awakens,” it’s hard not to see its plot as a ramped-up remake of “Star Wars”. “The Last Jedi” goes against what fans expected, and it suffered a backlash in some quarters as a result.

And yet, “The Last Jedi” is also a cruel movie, where betrayal and despair is everywhere. Watching the last remnants of the Rebellion slowly being picked off and almost every character suffering incredible losses is a downer, much like the ending of “Empire Strikes Back” was in 1981.

It’s likely that December’s Episode IX will live up to the title “The Rise of Skywalker” and deliver some kind of feel-good catharsis, but I don’t know. These are bleaker times than 1983. Cheesy as it may seem, the original trilogy had the standard-issue happy ending, with Ewoks singing wub-wub and everybody smiling at the force ghosts.

Perhaps it’s a more brutal world now or a less blinkered one, but “The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi” are here to tell us there are no happy endings. (MAJOR SPOILERS ahead if you have yet to see either of these movies.) Han Solo has an apparently failed marriage to Leia and dies alone on a bridge, killed by his own son. Luke Skywalker sees his every ambition fail and spends his final years bitter and alone on a rocky island. General Leia Organa’s entire life is filled with failure and loss, the Rebellion crumbling around her, and whatever her final fate in “The Rise of Skywalker” is likely to be, it’s coming at the end of a hard life. I’m only hoping Lando has had some happiness in his final years.

In the brief interregnum from 1984-1997 or so when “Star Wars” fandom went underground, where there were tons of comic book sequels and novels and the like, an entirely new ending was imagined for Han, Luke and Leia, one filled with ups and downs but definitely less fatalistic than the bleak realities of Episodes VII and VIII. I feel sad to see the characters I followed so obsessively as a kid not getting their happy endings. Then again, you can call back to Ben Kenobi’s lonely Tatooine exile or the brutal deaths of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru and say that “Star Wars” has always had harsh endings.

Yet I can’t fault its reality – war rarely ends cleanly or easily in real life, and it was always a stretch to imagine a bunch of Ewoks in a forest singlehandedly brought down a galactic empire. But I liked the fantasy. I liked the happy ending in 1983, and not having to read hot takes on it all the next day online. One of the biggest problems with the 42-year history of “Star Wars” now is that everyone has their own expectations of how things will go, and their own disappointment when it doesn’t measure up. Like most things, “Star Wars” is an imperfect creation, and part of being a fan of it all after decades is coming to grips with it.

In the end nothing will be as pure a love as the kind you had when you were a starry-eyed kid. I’ll always be a “Star Wars” fan, despite my misgivings. But it’s complicated.

Movies I Have Never Seen #3: Master Of The Flying Guillotine

What is it: It’s not exactly a household name, but in certain circles, it’s the holy bible of cheesy kung-fu schlock. Master of the Flying Guillotine is a 1976 Taiwanese film written by, directed by and starring Jimmy Wang Yu, a sequel to his One-Armed Boxer (about… you guessed it). It’s one of the wackiest kung fu movies of the ‘70s, featuring an insane blind assassin and his fearsome “flying guillotine” (a bizarre weapon which resembles a bladed cap attached to a chain. You throw it and boom, instant haircut). The guillotine master has a mad-on for the famed one-armed boxer who killed his students, and the entire movie is basically an excuse for inventive, crazed kung fu revenge ultraviolence, leading to a fantastic showdown between a one-armed fighter and a blind guillotine wielder.

Why I never saw it: Hell, I’d never even heard of it until recently, when I’ve been going on an extended martial arts movie binge, from the classic moves of Bruce Lee to the slapstick antics of Jackie Chan to the cool charms of Donnie Yen.

Does it measure up to its rep? This is one of Quentin Tarantino’s favourite movies and a clear influence on his “Kill Bill” series. It’s not slick, but its clunky moves (the ‘one-armed boxer’ moves about as smooth as I do on a Saturday morning), crazy krautrock-influenced soundtrack and bizarre characters make it unforgettable in a genre filled with wacky kung-fu killers. While Wang Yu is a kinda stiff leading man, Lung Kun Lee as the guillotine killer is fascinatingly over-the-top – with facial hair that makes him resemble a rabid woodchuck, a snarling theme song that announces his entrance, and a penchant for throwing explosives around every building he enters, he’s amazing. The entire movie stops dead at one point for a half-hour of so of a bloody, murder-filled martial arts tournament featuring crazily baroque fighters, which basically plays like “Mortal Kombat” invented 20 years earlier. There’s sheer energy to the way this revenge tale is framed that gives it a kick. Perhaps the best way to watch is it like I did, on a low-rent dubbed video which inexplicably switches back to Chinese 5-6 times during the middle of the movie for a few lines here and there. It’s like I was there in the grindhouse drive-in movie theatre parking lot of 1976 this movie was made for.

How’s it different than I thought: Unlike the other “flying guillotine” movies out there in this sub-sub genre, this is pretty bloodless. In fact, a couple of the marquee decapitations in this flick are like watching an abandoned puppet go down, made funnier because in one scene you can clearly see the “headless man” is a man with his still-attached head stuffed into an extra-large shirt. And we won’t even talk about how the “one-armed boxer” is clearly hiding his arm in his tunic in almost every scene.

Worth seeing? Absolutely. It’s the kind of kung-fu insanity I dreamed about as a lad, and a hidden gem if you haven’t discovered its sloppy charms yet.

The Elvis Presley behind the jokes

elvis Sometime in the next few months, Elvis Presley will have been dead longer than he’s been alive.

It’s 42 years today since Elvis died at age 42 in 1977, and it took a long time for me to take him seriously. For most of us Gen-Xers, the King of Rock ’n’ Roll who died fat and a parody of himself was a joke. It took me years to see that there’s a thousand different Elvises.

I was a California kid, but I lived in Elvis’ backyard for much of the 1990s, just outside Memphis and just an hour down the road from his birthplace of Tupelo. I wanted to work at Graceland for a summer job, but I couldn’t beat the competition. I fell in love with a girl from Tupelo. I slowly found the King behind the jokes.

There’s at least four eras of Elvis proper – the young fiery prodigy, captured best in the haunting Sun Records recordings that still amaze today; the post-Army burnout whose talents were wasted for years in movies and cheesy soundtracks; the black leather-clad colossus who stormed his way to a ’68 comeback, and who then melted into the sad sweaty mess of his final years.

When a legendary person dies, they slowly transform into myth. There’s a Shakespearean heft to the Presley story, a boy from nowhere who conquered the world. Elvis becomes a trailblazing comet or a paunchy punchline, a star of endless daffy movies, a boy who mourned his mother, a kung-fu kicking drug case who once pestered his way in to see Richard Nixon.

I like the “Comeback Elvis” years the best, from that stunning 1968 TV Special on to the early ‘70s. At his best, he’s like a lone gunslinger bashing through the saloon doors, reminding all the young guns why he mattered. It’s the height before the fall. He’s got the years to give him authority, but he’s still young enough to prowl like a tiger in that insane leather jumpsuit. There’s a horrible trail of wasted possibilities in the Elvis story, which you can lay at the feet of his drug problem, his emotional immaturity, or the terrible mismanagement by the Colonel, who never really understood the power of Elvis. The story is Elvis is a story of lost dreams.

Imagine if a 60-something Elvis had gone on to have a Johnny Cash-style latter years revival, if he’d just taken a stage with a guitar and a song and captured something of the haunting echoes of the Sun Studios years.

One of my favourite Elvis songs is “Hurt,” (not the Nine Inch Nails/Johnny Cash version, of course) which he covered just a year before he died. I used to listen to it with a jaded, ironic eye, because Elvis sings the HELL out of this song, murdering it with an unrestrained abandon that teeters right on the edge of parody. But listen to it, man. Listen to the voice breaking as the song launches into the stratosphere, listen to the way his voice dips deep into the canyons as he sings how he’s hurt “way deep inside of me.” He’s singing about a lot more kinds of hurt than just being dumped. This is Elvis in his autumn, looking back at his highs and lows.

It’s easy to see a punchline in the thousands and thousands of different Elvises the world has seen in the last 42 years. But deep inside the best of his songs, whether it’s the slow burn of “Mystery Train” or the unrestrained operatic bombast of “Hurt,” the real king still awaits.

Wallace Wood, the best darn comic book artist there ever was

Image (17) Who’s my favourite comic book artist of all time?

It’s a hard choice to make. Of course, there’s Jack “King” Kirby, dynamic and passionate and the founding father of modern superheroes. There’s Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko, nervy and intense and inventive, or the loose, energetic war and fantasy comics genius Joe Kubert, Robert Crumb’s neurotic creations, Herge’s elegant Tintin, and about a million more.

But on most days, I’ll tell you that I think the best comic book artist of all time was Wallace ‘Wally’ Wood.

Wood is one of the grand pillars of American comics – able to draw glorious science-fiction, chilling crime and horror and glamourous superheroes, all with a dense, classical sense of style that makes every panel of Wood at his peak seem like a museum piece.

I’ll look at a Wood panel for ages, drinking in the dense chiaroscuro of light and depth he created. Nobody drew gloopier, creepier aliens than Wood, more lantern-jawed spacemen, more gorgeous damsels. He’s one of the few comics artists whose work often looks best in the original black and white, without colouring.

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His greatest work was in the 1950s with the legendary EC Comics, on titles including Shock SuspensStories, Vault of Horror, and my personal favourites, the sci-fi duo of Weird Science and Weird Fantasy.

Wood illustrated many of the greatest science fiction comic stories of all time, singlehandedly crafting the images many of us think of when we imagine aliens and flying saucers (the creepy aliens of Mars Attacks? A Wood design).

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He’d go on to projects like Marvel’s Daredevil (that iconic red costume? Wood), the Justice Society, the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, his pioneering magazine witzend, classic war and horror comics for Creepy, his amazing Mad magazine strips and much more.

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Wood lived a tragic life, working himself far too hard, embittered by the way the industry treated him, suffering alcoholism, poor health and diabetes. He shot himself in 1981 at just 54 years old.