The View From The Mountain

In Cleaner Daisy Ridley ( Star Wars: The Force Awakens ) stars as Joanna “Joey” Locke, a window cleaner at a swanky London office building that serves as the headquarters for an energy company. Joey becomes late for work when she’s forced to take her autistic brother Michael (Matthew Tuck) to her job with her. Because of her lateness, her nimrod of a manager makes Joey work an hour late, well into the evening. Joey reluctantly keeps cleaning windows of bird splatter in the darkness, but eventually bird droppings wind up being the least of her problems. A team of terrorists arrive at a party that’s being held at the office for the energy company’s share holders. Disguised as performers, the terrorists seize the energy company’s board members as hostages, while knocking everybody else out with gas. Joey, still working on the windows outside, sees all of this and promptly goes into action. Because, as the film has earlier established, Joey is a former Britis...

Director Zack Snyder has made enough of my favorite films ( Man of Steel , Zack Snyder’s Justice League , the Dawn of the Dead remake) that I genuinely look forward to his latest project. Of course, he’s also made some real stinkers ( Sucker Punch , Batman Vs Superman ), but everybody has a bad day at the office, right? And I was brightened up considerably when I saw that his latest film, the star-spanning space saga Rebel Moon: Part One: A Child of Fire , would be premiering on my birthday on Netflix. And then I saw the frigging movie. Seriously, WTF did I do to deserve this on my birthday? Rebel Moon first started out life as a pitch for an R-rated Star Wars film that Lucasfilm, the producers of SW, had turned down. Undaunted, Snyder then brought the project to Netflix, and traces of its Star Wars inspiration still remain: the space Nazis, a scene in a cantina, the laser swords that one of the characters uses. But even if a film is...

Looking at the reviews for Andor , the latest Star Wars series produced by and exclusively for Disney Plus, they all say the same thing: that Andor is a vastly mature TV series--and it is. But many of these reviews also appear to be a back-handed insult to the Star Wars franchise in general, by stating how Andor was made for the adults in the room, and how it lacked the dopey ‘pew-pew-pew’ action of space wizards fighting each other with their laser swords that we get in Star Wars . And yeah, Star Wars does have its silly moments (and that’s pretty much all of Return of the Jedi ). But the very best of Star Wars (the original Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back , Rogue One , The Last Jedi ) strived mightily to be far more than the simple space operas they appeared to be. And even the films that didn’t have such lofty goals ( Solo , SW: Revenge of the Sith ) are still vastly entertaining. But it doesn’t appear that most people are really complaining abo...

The Orville has long been an entertaining science fiction show that got even better with its third (and possibly final) season. With shooting on the third season getting held up by the pandemic, Seth MacFarlane--who created the series, as well as stars as its Captain, Ed Mercer--seemingly took the added time to rework the scripts. And that was a very good thing. When The Orville first debuted, it was seen as a comedy that offered a funny, satirical view of Star Trek, the classic series from which The Orville was inspired by. The humor was very broad and bombastic, sometimes going a little over the top. But even in the first two seasons, the slapstick humor began to slowly be replaced by earnest storytelling as MacFarlane and his writers fleshed out their characters and the universe they lived in. And by doing this, The Orville only got better. While there’s still humor in the third season, and it’s much welcome (because the humor here is still genuinely fu...

Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley team up for Chaos Walking , a science fiction film that’s based on the book The Knife of Never Letting Go by author Patrick Ness. Ridley plays Viola, an astronaut who crash-lands on an alien planet that’s already been colonized by a first wave of settlers from Earth. The only problem is, she winds up in a settlement that consists only of men, with the women having vanished years before. And all of the men have a strange affliction where their thoughts can literally be seen and heard in the air around their heads. Holland plays Todd, the youngest member of the colony who comes to Viola’s aid--although it becomes an equal partnership as Viola and Todd fight to survive in a world gone mad! Chaos Walking was directed by Doug Liman, who’s done some pretty good films in the past (Edge of Tomorrow, Go), and it runs with its interesting premise of how all of the males’ thoughts on this planet are an open book (women’s thoughts remain ...

Janis Joplin was my first dead celebrity. She was one of my parents’ favorite singers back when I was a kid, and I vividly recall being informed by my mother that Joplin had died. One of Joplin’s albums was playing at that moment on our stereo’s 8-Track player, and I went over and listened to the voice of a dead woman singing. That blew my mind as a young boy, and it also creeped me out big time, as well. I had that same creeped-out feeling while watching re-animated Carrie Fisher casually walking around and talking in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker . Although she had passed away long before her appearance in The Last Jedi , it didn’t bother me watching Fisher in Last Jedi because I knew that she was alive and well while filming that movie (and that it was one of the last things she had shot). But for Rise of Skywalker , Fisher’s performance had been created using old, unused footage leftover from The Force Awakens , and yet I could never shake the unpleasant feeling that the dec...

I recently saw Star Wars Rebels for the first time, and fell in love with a TIE fighter that was on the show. It was a converted TIE fighter with the front panels cut off, and painted yellow. This class of fighter was used by the Mining Guild on Star Wars Rebels . It would make sense for mining operations in the service of the Empire to have their own fighter squadrons for protection. I had an old 1/48 scale TIE fighter model lying around in pieces--I had always meant to fix it up again, and so I did: but as the Mining Guild version of the TIE fighter. I like the design. It's simple enough to convert. Cutting off the panels was easily done, and the yellow paint job really helps to give it a distinctive look. And being 1/48 scale (it's the old TIE fighter kit from Revel) it's bigger than the 1/72 scale TIE models out there. If you're interested, I have this up for sale. --SF

I built the 1/48 model kit of the AT-ST Walker from Ban Dai. This is actually the second of these that I built. The first AT-ST I built, I painted it a forest camouflage pattern. With this second walker, I decided to paint it in a desert scheme. I used "sand" colored Americana acrylic hobby paint. This Ban Dai model is so good because it has such great little details that make the model seem more realistic. I dirtied up the walker with "dark brown" acrylic paint. The decals are from another kit in my decal collection.

I remember the hysteria surrounding the release of Solo: A Star Wars story. It was a two-pronged attack: the first was the hand-wringing over the fact that they released a Star Wars movie barely six months after the last one ( The Last Jedi , which managed to scare up some mass hysteria on its own), and the other being the “fact” that Solo was yet another brain-washing piece of excrement (along with The Last Jedi —jeez, that flick really knew how to make new friends and influence people, didn’t it?) that had been released by the “evil” Kathleen Kennedy, who runs Lucasfilm—and who should now fall on her sword, since Solo didn’t make the mega trillions that it was expected to haul in. But amidst all of this panic and frenzied second guessing remains a very important question. Is Solo: A Star Wars Story any good? Yes, it is. Not only is Solo good, it’s an extremely well-made space adventure that actually manages to be a fun ride. Pushing aside all of the hysteria that surrounded this...

Warning, there are spoilers in this review. Please wait until you have seen The Last Jedi before you read this. I went to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi feeling pretty confident that it would be good. This latest chapter in the (hopefully) neverending Star Wars saga was directed by Rian Johnson, who also did the superb Looper and The Brothers Bloom --the latter being one of my favorite films, and not just because Rachel Weisz co-stars in it. I was hoping Johnson could deliver a new Star Wars film with this sequel that would be more satisfying by simply not being another stealth remake--like what the last third of The Force Awakens turned into (don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed that film, though). But, having now seen it, I can say that The Last Jedi was far more than satisfying. It was magnificent. The great thing about The Last Jedi is that Rian Johnson takes whatever preconceptions the viewer has and flips them right over. Just when you think a character or a scene is...