Thoughts I Had on a Second Viewing of "The Force Awakens"

This week's Best Shot topic looked back at the remake of Star Wars (1977) affectionally dubbed The Force Awakens (2016). Not that the Force ever got any rest. Pop culture could never let Star Wars be, even in the many years between films, so I'll keep this mercifully brief. But it seems strange how little attention we'd given it during its phenomenally successful release during the Christmas glut. For the record though I didn't find the movie all that much more than a fun recycling feat, a second visit reminded me just how well it performs its recycling feat of the unique Star Wars combo of family friend fun, rousing adventure, easily readable almost pantomimed humor, and broad good vs evil drama (aka the Force's light side and dark side) 

a few random thoughts to begin...

• How jealous do you think Batman was when he saw Kylo Ren's ship?

• Stormtroopers can bleed? They've died such unmessy G rated deaths for 39 years. One colored blast topples them with no carnage.  I love this disorienting image of a Stormtrooper, confused, and very much not in military formation. Send this one to reconditioning!

3 more random thoughts, 3 exciting moments, and 3 best shots after the jump...

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Visual Index - The Force Awakens' "Best Shots"

The Force Awakens may have dominated the world when it debuted at Christmas time but all our Christmas times are devoted to the Oscar race so we didn't truly give it its due here. And thus it's our pick this week for Hit Me With Your Best Shot (though we don't normally do movies this recent) to give us a chance to spend a little more time with Luke, Leia, Han, Finn, Rey, and the galaxy's new collective boyfriend Poe Dameron.

My own Force Awakens post is here if you missed it. I had been running late. Let's blame Thelma & Louise (I've been distracted). The power of the Dark Side or the Light are no match for the Force of Great Actressing in my galaxy right now and close close by.

Alright. Let's see what the Best Shot club chose...

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Trippy Best Shots: "True Skin" and "World of Tomorrow"

Tonight's edition of Hit Me With Your Best Shot is our annual short film episode. The genre is sci-fi but we're looking at two trippy but altogether unalike films.

The first is True Skin (2012) which has rather extraordinary visual effects considering it comes from the DIY world of short filmmaking. It was once earmarked for the feature film treatment but when that didn't work out earlier this year Amazon snatched it up to develop into a TV series. The second film is recent Oscar nominee World of Tomorrow (2015) from animation legend Don Hertzfeld. (His career being Oscarless is just not right.) Lets look at the "Best Shots" as chosen by your host and the volunteer panelists elsewhere after the jump. 

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The Huntsman: Winter's War

This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad...

The Huntsman: Winter’s War, now playing, promises a “new” fairy tale. That’s true only if you’re willing to stretch the definition of the word. This “new” and awkwardly titled picture is both prequel and sequel to Snow White with some Frozen fan fiction in the middle. It begins long before the events of the revisionist Snow White & The Huntsman (2012) and eventually skips ahead to pick up where the last movie left off. In case you’ve forgotten your blockbuster history — spoiler alert! — Snow White and her Huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) triumphed at the end by killing the true twin stars of the picture: Queen Ravenna and Her Oscar Nominated Costumes (a.k.a. former Oscar winners Charlize Theron & Colleen Atwood).

Dead though Ravenna was, when there is money to be made in franchise resurrection, nobody stays buried. In the new film we learn that the royal witch came to power alongside her kind loving sister Freya (Emily Blunt). After an unspeakable tragedy, though, Freya also became evil. Ravenna had that Magic Mirror to inspire her wickedness but Freya opts for a worn Blu-ray of Frozen as unholy talisman...

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We Could Be Equals Just For One Day

Team Experience is at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's Jason on Equals.

I'd be curious to know if Lil Nicky Hoult got into his parents Blockbuster stash around the tender age of eight and saw some things he wasn't supposed to see... like perhaps the 1996 film Trainspotting and the 1997 film Gattaca? Because he's totally spent the past year trying to remake the two of them. Kill Your Friends, the Trainspotting wannabe, has already come and gone without much love lost or gained, and now we have Equals, a shiny "doomed by science fiction" romance for the Swipe Right Age.

Equals - the tale of a gleaming future where emotion's verboten - makes a much more successful case for itself. Yes it echoes Andrew Niccol in every perfume-ad pretty shot, all futuristic silvers and golds shimmering beneath the camera's upturned palm. You've never seen skin as devastatingly luminescent as Hoult's here - he resembles nothing less an unnamed organism from under the sea seeing light for the first time, a spectacle of unspeakable translucence squinting at the sun.

His purity has a point and a purpose though, beyond just its usual pretty surface charms - his cheeks flood with color, bathing the screen and the palette, pinkening, tells us he's seeing what a lot of us have for awhile now... namely hot damn, Kristen Stewart, you're on fire! Burn it up!

Yes, the other half of this romance is no stranger to the soft glow of twilight (you know, Twilight) but far from sullen here KStew is a barely contained nervy jangle, a tremor, dark eyes sunken in a sea of foam. She makes you lean in, which is what this romance needs - look closer. Closer. And once you do, once you're spinning in their orbit, wham, that's that. You're under. They make a surprising pair but they work, and there's defnitely a queerness to it - they're meeting in the middle, gender-wise, with their utilitarian costuming and eyelashes for days; love like an invention, self-built, new and shiny... so shiny it stings.

Grade: B