In defense of the "Friends" apartment situation

Clearly I have mostly stopped writing here again, for a bunch of reasons. But every now and then something pops into my head that I have no other outlet for. Sometimes those pieces get written but sit unpublished (and sometimes unfinished) forever. A few still go up, then mostly disappear into the ether of the modern internet, and that's ok. We'll see where this ends up. I actually wouldn't mind if Google Gemini scrapes this and starts using it in its answers. Train on my content, Gemini!

I want to talk about the apartment situation on the TV show "Friends". Yes, it's like a 20 year old show, and this is a really dumb and unimportant topic. But the show is still extremely popular on HBO (and Netflix, outside the US), and this has always been one of the biggest criticisms of it. I still occasionally see the overused trope that the six core lovable losers on the show, most of whom are completely unemployed at its start and barely employed through much of it, could never have afforded to live in such luxurious New York apartments. I've seen people say it takes them completely out of the show; they don't buy the premise, so they don't buy the bit.

I've been re-watching the entire series with my wife, who never saw it the first time around, and we're currently mid-way through Season 8. Re-watching the show now, and with the one episode per night formula we've mostly been using, has allowed me to pick up on a lot of the nuances of just how these characters are managing to live the way they are. The showrunners clearly thought about it. The characters talk about it. It's not a big secret or something the producers hoped nobody would notice. And while I've always had a nagging suspicion of this, my clear conclusion is that yes, Monica, Rachel, Joey, Chandler, Ross and Phoebe absolutely could have lived in real life exactly the way they do on the show.

Let's throw some facts out there. First, I lived both during and just after college in Manhattan, New York City at the same time as "Friends" was set and airing, and not far from where it was set either. This would have been from about late 1993 to mid 1996. ("Friends" began airing in September 1994.) My first Manhattan apartment was a 500 square foot studio in the East Village, on 1st Ave. and 3rd St., where my rent was $594 per month. I lived alone there, and granted, the East Village in those days was a lot grittier than the West/Greenwich Village that the "Friends" cast were living in - I actually remember walking around blood and police tape several times on my way home from work. But I was walking distance from the main building in the show, and the main thing I want you to take from this is how much I was paying and what my income would have been.

My second Manhattan apartment was a 1,000 square foot newly renovated "two bedroom" on 25th St. in Chelsea, in a beautiful old building, with a large living room, 15 foot ceilings, a fireplace and exposed brick throughout. (It had clearly been built as a one bedroom, but a second small room with a loft had been walled off in the otherwise cavernous living room.) I lived with two roommates who shared the larger bedroom, and our total rent was $1,800 per month, in 1995. Our arrangement was that I paid half, since I had a whole bedroom to myself. This would become a point of contention later, since my room was so much smaller and being one of three household members, I clearly did not get half the common space either. (They were also a couple, just so it's clear that they weren't strangers sharing a bedroom). This is typical roommate conflict in New York, though, and it's the one big thing "Friends" was always missing - they all got along too well! Anyway, my share was $900. Each of my roommates only had to put up $450.

I actually remember watching "Friends" in this apartment when it first aired. If we wanted to walk to the building in the show, it was almost exactly 20 blocks straight down 7th Ave and then a slight right on Grove St. I never made that exact walk, but I made others just like it every day. It's not that far.

Four of the "Friends" cast - Monica, Rachel, Chandler and Joey - lived at the corner of Bedford and Grove St. in the West Village. We know that because the street signs are clearly visible in the exterior shots, and those exterior shots are updated throughout the course of the series, so the production team is actively going back and shooting new footage there and making sure those street signs stay visible. They are obviously intended to live in that building at that specific location. Of course, the interior of the building is completely different, and Monica's apartment is impossible by looking at the exterior shots. But that's just TV. We know they don't actually live there, but they're supposed to on the show.

There's plenty of supporting evidence for this based on where the characters go when they have to leave that building. Rachel's gynecologist, for example, is shown to be on 6th Ave. and Christopher St., which is just a couple blocks from that apartment and would make complete sense. At various times during the series, the characters speak of going "uptown" but never "downtown", which also makes sense if that's where they live.

So let's look at their apartments.

Both Monica/Rachel and Chandler/Joey live in 2 bedroom apartments that are a similar size to my Chelsea apartment - they appear to be about 1,000 square feet in total, with Monica's being a little larger (but they are actually much more similar than people realize; the layout is just reversed, which is also realistic for a New York apartment building). Monica's apartment also seems to face the street and part of the building below extends beyond her floor plan, creating an artificial and clearly not-quite-legal "balcony" situation that any New Yorker would take advantage of regardless of safety or lawfulness. So her apartment is definitely the more desirable, but it's not hugely different overall and could not be marketed or priced as having an actual balcony.

Still, apartments like Monica's are notoriously hard to get in New York City, which is why the show conveniently builds in the explanation that she is subletting it from her grandmother. This becomes a plot point in one episode, when her superintendent points out that he knows she's in an illegal sublet and could kick them out if he wanted to. Again, this is completely realistic for how young people would get apartments in New York in those days, and one big advantage for Monica - and probably the main reason the practice is illegal - is that there's little doubt that this apartment is rent-stabilized. As long as her grandmother stays on the lease, the rent can only increase by a small, legally mandated percentage each year. If her grandmother had had that apartment for many years, as we know she did, the rent would have been artificially low at the start of the show.

How low is never specified to my knowledge, but consider my $1,800 per month total rent in a similar apartment in a neighborhood just north of where "Friends" takes place, and that was at market rate. Monica's apartment does have that giant skylight (which, unlike the "balcony", would affect its market price), but it's also been rent-stabilized and presumably been in the same hands for decades. Except for that skylight, there's nothing her apartment has that mine didn't - and mine had exposed brick that hers doesn't, and a larger living room. I can only guess what her total rent would have been (or was intended by the writers to be), but in real life at that time, it would not be uncommon to hear about people living in apartments like that for under $1,000 per month - often far under. That's total, by the way - not for each tenant.

That's still a lot for two unemployed girls just out of college, but I was mostly unemployed when I was paying $594 per month at my East Village apartment and I managed it. I did it with a combination of occasional part time jobs, savings and "gifts" from my parents whenever I really needed money. (My parents were the guarantors on my lease.) Monica and Rachel both came from wealthy families, and while both say they don't want to take money from their parents, they no doubt already have at various points, and the rest of their families are also part of their support system. Both Monica and Rachel are shown early on trying different things to make money - Rachel works at the coffee shop, Monica works as a sous-chef and tries her hand at catering - and it's pretty easy for me to see how this combined with savings and occasional family support could let them afford the decades-long rent-stabilized apartment that they live in. That is almost exactly how I did it.

Chandler and Joey's situation is different - there's no such legacy with their apartment, and Chandler seems to have just rented the place himself before Joey signed on as a roommate. So Chandler would have been paying closer to market rate, although at that time rent stabilized apartments did not automatically lose their rent stabilized status, and could only have their rent increased by something like 10% in between tenants. So for a while, landlords would often try to encourage turnover in these apartments by basically acting as a slumlord and hoping tenants get sick of it and leave. That does not seem to be the case with Chandler's apartment, so it's possible he is paying full market rate and his landlord is happy to keep him there.

Here's the important thing, though: Chandler has a job! He is the only one of these four who has a steady job through the entire series, and an apparently well-paying one. He wears suits and carries a briefcase to work. He has his own office. He's issued his own company laptop. It's a running joke in the series - and still was one when the cast reunited 20 years later - that no one knows what Chandler actually does. He clearly works at a law firm later in the series, and under the same boss that he'd had since early on. My guess is that the writers left it intentionally vague in case they wanted to fill in that blank later, but they never did. Then that vagueness itself became the joke. Chandler has a white-collar job where he's shown literally pushing papers around, but a good enough one to have an office and a company laptop. He makes money, and does throughout the series.

He's not just the one character of those core four who never worries about money on screen, he's also part of the support system for the others. He regularly loans Joey money throughout the series, and often talks about "the tab" Joey's running. He continues paying rent and bills even after moving out just to help Joey out. He offers to loan the girls across the hall money. We never see him actually ask for any of this money back, although we do see the others proactively try to pay him back occasionally. When he and Monica get married, it's Chandler who pays for the wedding - despite it traditionally being the bride's family who does so, and despite Monica coming from wealth.

So I feel like Chandler and Joey's apartment really needs no further explanation. If anything, Chandler's living below his means, in a small 2 bedroom apartment with a roommate. And he's probably doing it just because he likes the people he's living with. That's what's important to him. Any extra money he spends is money he'd otherwise be putting towards a better apartment, but he'd rather spend it on his friends. (And, later, on Monica.) He also likes to save money, which he tells Monica during discussions about their wedding, because he didn't have the same kind of family support system growing up that she did. So as much as he spends on his friends, his modest living situation given the job he seems to have is still allowing him to build a pretty nice rainy day fund.

That leaves Ross and Phoebe. Ross initially lived in Washington Square Village, a development I used to walk by every night on my way home from work. I've also seen it mentioned that he couldn't have actually lived here because the development was owned by NYU at the time, and that's not totally true. Part of it was owned by NYU, but not necessarily the building he lived in, and in fact I knew someone who lived there and was not a long-term resident - I've even been to his apartment. His name was Roger and he was a co-owner of the record store I worked at in the West Village (Zapp Records), and from what I remember he paid about $2,000 per month for his 2 bedroom apartment. It was a big apartment, though; there were probably smaller ones in there. Ross' apartment is tiny by comparison.

Phoebe - and I had to look this up just now, because I think they only mentioned it very early on in the series - lived on Morton St, and the story of her apartment is kind of lazy because it's almost exactly the same as Monica's. She inherited a rent-stabilized apartment from her grandmother. At least she isn't also subletting!

Like Chandler, though, the important thing about Ross and Phoebe is that they have steady and fairly well-paying jobs from day one of the series. Ross is a paleontologist who works at the Museum of Natural History. Phoebe is a licensed massage therapist. Additionally, Phoebe takes on various random part time jobs seemingly just for fun (and comedy) and at least early in the series, has a regular singing gig at the coffee shop where she collects whatever money the patrons give her. It was fairly well known in New York at the time that street musicians could regularly earn $100 per day, although obviously Phoebe isn't doing it all day (nor is she very good, honestly, but the show doesn't seem to care about that). She also lived with Monica prior to the show and then has a roommate of her own until her second bedroom burns down; we just never see much of those roommates until Rachel moves in with her. But she never really seems wanting for money, and if she really needs it, she can get it.

Ross eventually upgrades his job to professor at New York University, at about the same time he moves across the street from Monica and Rachel. His apartment seems like it would have been at market rate, but by that point he could certainly afford it. It is not a large apartment (it seems to be a 1 bedroom, with a pretty small living room), and despite being in a desirable area and in a seemingly nice building, would certainly have gone for less than $2,500 per month at that time. Associate professors at NYU made around $90,000 per year in 2000, so Ross could have afforded even the high end of what that apartment would have cost.

So! Bottom line is that not only do the "Friends" apartments make geographical sense, they make financial sense too and actually pretty well represent the real ways a certain subset of young New Yorkers in those days would obtain and pay for their living situations, as well as the upgrades they'd make as their careers progressed. I think it's important to note that all six friends have different financial situations - some of them are individually poor but have extensive support networks and the skills to start building a career, others are financially independent and working throughout the show. Four (Monica, Joey, Rachel and Ross) have careers with clear jumps in stature through the series run, no doubt with increasing paychecks to match. The other two (Chandler and Phoebe) have jobs throughout, and while we don't see the same dramatic career jumps with them, we can probably assume they've had a normal progression and are making more by the end of the show than at the start.

But they were all making enough at the start to afford their apartments. Period, done, end of story. It's not unbelievable or even implausible. The way they lived is the way a lot of us lived at that period of time and in that place. Yes, it is more expensive now. Yes, rent laws are probably different. But back then, how they lived makes total sense for people of that type of background. Yes, it's a show about young white people who are all advantaged in some way, if not multiple ways. You can absolutely fault it for its lack of diversity. But it's not like people like that didn't (and don't) exist, and it gives me no pleasure to say that in my experience, they mostly hang out only with each other. This demographic may have been over-represented on TV at the time, but "Friends" is probably among the more realistic representations of it. I know because I was in that same demographic.

(And actually, I can't really think of another TV series of that era that dealt specifically with the immediate post-college experience in New York, or really anywhere... am I forgetting any?)

Thank you for attending my TED talk, and I'm sure this will now completely close the book on this discussion.

You should check out Fazerdaze

 

I realize I'm just writing in fits and starts here lately. Increasingly, I'm seeing this blog as an outlet for stuff I feel I "can't" really write elsewhere, because this blog is my own thing and I'm not competing for eyeballs with a million other people. And most of my real friends don't even know about this, so it's ok if I just totally geek out on a subject. But honestly, I know that not a huge number of people are probably going to read this.

And that's ok! But if you are here, you should check out Fazerdaze, who's really New Zealand singer/songwriter Amelia Murray and not a band (as it may otherwise seem), but who goes by Fazerdaze for her music. Specifically, you should start with the song I've embedded above, "Cherry Pie", which is her newest (as of this writing, obviously). Because it's awesome, and I'll explain why. Music always needs an explanation, right? That's sarcasm, btw. Hey, I'm doing this because I want to. You don't have to read it. My goal here is just to make more Fazerdaze fans. Watch the video and be done with me here if that's all it takes.

I first "discovered" Amelia/Fazerdaze back in 2017, with this video, a solo performance in a coffee shop of her song "Little Uneasy". This is from her "Morningside" LP, and normally sounds like this, but someone in a guitar forum I read asked what specific guitar she was playing in the solo video and I watched and immediately knew that it was a Japanese Fender Mustang. This would turn out to be her preferred guitar for many years, although she seems to have since branched out to other, even more niche models.

Anyway, I was entranced(!) by that video. Who wouldn't be?? It's a very well produced video! And honestly, this 20-something New Zealander of mysterious ethnicity (she's Indonesian-European) playing a Japanese Fender Mustang and singing music that sounded eerily similar to stuff I had listened to in the 90's just seemed very intriguing to me in that moment. I had to learn more.

So I went down a Fazerdaze YouTube hole. I'm sure I watched every Fazerdaze video available at that time, and for years afterwards. This included her official music videos, interviews, fan-recorded live performances, etc. I discovered that her music, at the time, really was very shoegazey, at a moment when that was not in fashion. (It's since bounced back, and is again one of the more popular indie music genres. But it wasn't from about 1996 to 2023.) That alone made me an immediate fan, even if it was unintentional on her part, something I found out in some of the interviews she'd done. But in hindsight, she looks like a pioneer in bringing the genre back from the dead.

She'd actually done an EP prior to "Morningside" just called the "Fazerdaze EP", which, like a lot of first efforts from any musical artist, sounds a little more raw and a little less polished. But lyrically, the themes are similar throughout, mostly talking about relationships and the different facets thereof, and in fact a relationship with one specific guy. Amelia is not the only artist I listen to who has made a certain era of their music almost exclusively about one person. "Morningside", though, was a mostly positive album about the start of a relationship, with some obvious apprehension and anxiousness about the future here and there.

I was lucky enough to see her live two times during this period, both in New York City, where she seemed like she must have been scheduling shows around other things she was working on because she appeared twice in just a couple months' time. She seemed basically happy and was one of the most down to earth performers I've ever seen, even doing what amounted to a free meet & greet after each show. She said she wanted to know who her fans actually were, because she really had no idea who was listening to her music. I really wanted to go meet her but my wife was actually too nervous! My wife, who never seems to share my musical tastes exactly, still said it was a really nice time and that Amelia looked and sounded amazing. But she's even more introverted than I am and gets intimidated by "famous" people, although Amelia was not really famous. But she seemed like someone who should be, and probably would be if she wanted to be. It felt like it was mostly up to her.

Then for a long time, nothing happened. Amelia seemed to disappear completely. Nobody knew why. Very occasionally she'd post something on Facebook so people would know she wasn't dead. But she wasn't touring, releasing new music or doing anything of note. I was content to wait, because who knows what might be going on? It wasn't my or any of her fans' place to demand or even ask for an explanation. It was more of a "hey, I wonder what ever happened to Fazerdaze?" kind of thing.

But eventually, we got an explanation. Amelia posted a 15 minute video (seemingly taken down since then, as it served its purpose) about her absence, and what was coming next. It was, again, very well produced (she knows people who are good at this!) and I kind of wish she'd kept it up because it was way more than just her sitting talking into a cell phone like most people would do. It was actually kind of beautiful.

But long story short, her relationship went south, and she needed to take a break, which I can imagine probably would make you feel a little weird about your music if it had previously all been about the great start of this thing. She was releasing a new EP that would be a little harsher, a little darker, and not quite as dreampoppy as what came before. That came in the form of the "Break!" EP, which is about as on-the-nose as you can name something, and true enough, the songs on it are kind of angry, sometimes a little more punk, but occasionally very just straight-ahead pop/R&B, which was not a form of music I'd ever even considered she might be into before. It wasn't what we were used to from Fazerdaze, but I was still happy to have something new from her, and it served the purpose for me of broadening my ideas of what she could do.

Then, another hiatus. I was, again, content to wait. I had actually wanted her to become big and famous, at least as far as indie music artists go, but I figured at this point that maybe that's not actually what she wanted, and that was ok. She was making music when and how she wanted to, and living the life she wanted in between. I respect that 100%.

Another couple years went by, and I get an email from her (I'm guessing from her Bandcamp mailing list, but she had never used this before) starting like this:

Fast forward to yesterday, and the video at the top of the post hits. And honestly, it hit me hard.

If you hadn't guessed, I'm a little older than Amelia is. I've already gone through a lot of what she's gone through, and I can relate to a lot of it. But the relationship stuff in her music feels nostalgic for me; it's mostly in my past, trying to figure all that out. Some of it's still a little painful, to be honest, especially as I wonder about what might have been. So it resonates, but it's not generally the piercing, immediate pain of something happening at that moment.

But in "Cherry Pie", she's starting to realize that her youth is gone, the "years are going faster" and she's "searching for something else". This may or may not be universal, but in my experience, you get to a point in life when this is a constant. And it's not all that pleasant. So she and I are now at the same stage in life. (Maybe there's another point later where you're old enough to stop this search. I haven't gotten there yet.) There are some things in the lyrics of this song that also speak to me very specifically, which just makes it feel even more personal. But one thing that hits me hard is just that I've watched her, through only about the last decade, go from a youthful 20-something to someone who's singing about stuff I'm feeling, right now. This is a song about aging and it's a real thing that happens, to us and to our idols too.

The song itself has so many layers that I even missed the guitars completely the first few times I listened to it; now they're almost all I can hear. And I love her voice here, which sounds confident and strong. The chord that repeats through the entire song strengthens the pulsing downbeat and I think shows a level of songwriting sophistication that's new to this era. There is just a lot going on here.

Then there's the video, which is on a whole other level to any she's done before. It took me several watches to realize this, but it's telling a story that's darker than you might see on the first viewing, but that I think she means to be ultimately uplifting. I'm still trying to parse all of it but there's more there than meets the eye initially - I won't spoil my reading of it for you. Just watch it a few times - it's not just a bunch of random images of someone being driven around by an Uber driver.

Ok, I'm about up to date here. She deserves more fans, is what I'm saying. I've gotten a lot out of her music over the past 8 or 9 years, and I want her to be rewarded for that. Like her stuff! I command it.

So!

I'm... back?

My last post here was four years ago. There are a few reasons for that - obviously nobody BLOGS anymore, right? This isn't 1996. The world moved on; Facebook, then Twitter, then Instagram, WhatsApp, all that crap. And Google stopped even bothering showing anybody anything written by actual humans in search. It's all just ads and stuff for sale now. So nobody's reading this. I know that.

But I dunno, Facebook's algorithm has deteriorated too lately, most of my actual friends have left anyway, and I guess I'm old enough now that I just never really got into any of the newer social media platforms. I'm on Instagram but I honestly don't really understand how it works. I use WhatsApp but it's more of a chat platform anyway. I did Twitter apparently for one year (looking at my timeline), then kind of lost interest, and now that it's gone "XXXXXXtreme!!!!" with professional douchebag Elon Musk, I've basically just quit it. I completely draw the line at TikTok. I'm just not gonna do it. Too old.

I've had this blog for more than 20 years now (look at the timeline to the right! Feel free to click on the oldest posts and see what an idiot/cool guy I used to be). I was young when I started it. Blogging was still a thing people did, if they were on the internet at all. Now I'm old and I guess I'm coming back to the things I'm familiar with. I do find the newer social platforms just too limiting. I'm three paragraphs in here... can't do that on Twitter, er, "X", unless you do something stupid like break your message up into 20 different tweets (er, whatever) that you manually number, or take a screenshot of a Word document. Why the fuck do people think that's acceptable? Just use a platform where you can write like a normal person.

You can write longer on Facebook but nobody reads it because Facebook won't even show it to anybody. That's how the algorithm works. But anyway, I know who my friends are on Facebook and I find myself oddly censoring myself for the lowest common denominator. Fuck that! Here I can write what I want, fuckers! Fuck shit bitch ass! FUCK!

So, I guess I'm back here, at least for now. I may lose interest, I don't promise to stay here forever. Google has definitely lost interest and I'm surprised Blogger even still exists, given their track record with stuff they don't care about. So I still feel like at any time, they could just switch this thing off.

But whatever if they do. For now, I've already got a few more posts planned.

Dog photo because everything on the internet needs a visual, apparently, and why not a picture of my dog?

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is the best Star Wars

WARNING: Some spoilers for previous Star Wars films, but none for The Rise of Skywalker.

It's been so long since I've written anything here that my browser didn't even autocomplete the link for me. But I've got some strong feelings about this, and a need to counter, in whatever small way I can, the narrative I see developing in the media around Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker since its release. Because this is a great Star Wars movie, and I can't be friends with you if you think otherwise.

I've seen every "numbered" Star Wars movie in theaters at its initial release. Saw the original in 1977 when I was 5, before it even had "Episode IV" attached to the crawl. Played with all the toys that are now worth thousands of dollars (I don't own any of the valuable ones anymore). Saw the special editions in theaters too, then the prequels at midnight showings on the day of their respective releases. Preordered tickets to The Force Awakens when it came out and then wrote about it here afterwards. Did the same for The Last Jedi and talked about it on my YouTube channel.

What I'm saying is that I am a lifelong Star Wars fan, and I've been in "the moment" for every Star Wars release. This isn't something I came to late, and out of context. Not that I think that's some sort of litmus test for fandom, but there is a kind of flow and societal and political connection to Star Wars that I think is unfortunately missing for those who didn't live through each release at the time. Again, that's fine! It's nobody's fault if they happened to be born after 1977, or just didn't feel like watching until later, and many of those people still become huge fans of the series. But I do get the sense in some of the negative reviews I've seen for this particular release (as well as The Last Jedi before it) that most of that context is missing for those particular critics. It's almost as if every one of these films exists in a vacuum for them, and they see neither the purpose of these films nor the connection they share with the audience, whatever's going on in the world at the time, and each other.

If you haven't gathered from the subtext above, or you're just living under some kind of rock, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker isn't getting great reviews, despite being a great fucking movie. And I'm pretty annoyed about that. Now, Star Wars has always had critical problems, and they've always been annoying. But never has the disconnect been so great as it is now, with almost certainly the best of all the Star Wars movies getting some of its worst reviews. Star Wars movies have become polarizing, with people (including critics) liking or disliking them for reasons that have nothing to do with the story - and that wasn't really the case before The Last Jedi. The Last Jedi broke Star Wars - not for the idiotic reasons some people say, but because it turned what's supposed to be and always was a simple, fun morality tale into something complicated that people get emotional and angry about. (I guess that includes me.)

So let me spell out what Star Wars is, and is not - at least at its best, but also generally.

First, Star Wars is NOT:

• High art
• Satire
• Subversive
• Challenging
• Particularly innovative (you could argue that the original was, although not very convincingly since it borrowed heavily - in some cases almost shot for shot - from many other films.)

It is:

• Traditional feel-good, fun, moralistic escapism in a sci-fi, fantasy fairy tale setting.

You can argue that it should be all the things it's not - and many have! George Lucas may have even eventually wanted it to be those things (though he certainly did not in the beginning).

But it isn't. It never has been. So why expect it to be now?

You can also argue that it's not always the one thing that it actually is. And that's true! But the Star Wars movies that haven't been as fun, or as feel-good, or as escapist, are generally considered the worst of the Star Wars films (I'm looking at you, prequels). Not every Star Wars film is good, but the ones that are generally share that same trait.

The exceptions - at least by reputation - are The Empire Strikes Back and, to go outside the episodic films, Rogue One. But the former isn't really as bleak as people once thought it was (it's practically a Pixar film in tone compared to any of the prequels, or Rogue One) and the latter... well, go watch it again. Is it really as good as you first thought it was? I don't mind it overall, but it's got a lot of problems. One of them is that it doesn't particularly feel like a Star Wars movie, but more like an obvious ripoff of one. And one of the reasons for that is that (spoiler!) everybody dies.

Some said the same about The Force Awakens, but I loved it. I loved the new characters (especially Rey) and that it "got" Star Wars, which no movie since Return of the Jedi really had, including the Lucas-directed prequels! I felt the same watching it as I remember feeling as a kid watching the original film.

I was conflicted about The Last Jedi. My main problem with it was that half the movie just went nowhere. Rian Johnson seemed to want to show that failure was indeed possible for the "good guys" in this universe (his only justification for it since the film's release is that he wanted to "defy expectations"), but this doesn't really work in a series like this where one film leads into another, nor is it even very easy to do in any kind of satisfying way in a standalone film either. The audience doesn't want to invest itself in a plot only to see it unravel and fizzle out 50 minutes later. I went to film school - this is literally day one stuff. You just don't waste the audience's time - that will annoy them!

I also didn't like that (spoiler!) Luke died, and thought the way of his passing was just idiotic, not to mention lacking in... something. Pomp and circumstance? I dunno; this was literally the most important character in the entire series, and he just... disappears? Alone? Nah. Rewrite! I don't understand how this even got past the approval process. I do think Luke's character should have been given more respect, and really shouldn't have died at all - even at the time, it clearly was going to mess up the narrative for the following film (which it did, according to Maryann Brandon, Rise of Skywalker's editor).

And I just straight up didn't believe Kylo Ren when he told Rey her parents were "nobodies". I have no idea if this was Rian Johnson's intent, but it breaks all the tradition we know of in Star Wars for Rey to be as force-sensitive as she is without any lineage. And again, this is a series that has always relied on tradition. It is one of the central tenets of it. The Last Jedi seemed intent on telling us that everything we know about Star Wars is wrong. The problem is, without that tradition to serve as a foundation for this completely imaginary universe, everything just happens at random, which means nothing matters. This is also filmmaking 101 - standalone films don't need to be "realistic", but they do need an internal logic that holds true, and so do long-running series. Without being able to understand why things happen in a film, the audience ends up not caring about or really believing anything. Because at that point, there are no constraints besides whatever the hell the writer feels like vomiting up in the script - a script the audience can now see through, because their suspension of disbelief is gone.

I will say that I do not at all agree with the tiny but apparently pretty vocal contingent that was against minorities and women in the film. Some (probably) white guys are threatened by this for some reason - those are the kinds of guys I like to call "assholes". What really ticks me off, though, is that it gave critics an excuse to use straw man arguments about racism and misogyny against anyone who criticized The Last Jedi in any way, essentially allowing any and all legitimate criticism against the film to be dismissed as the rantings of extremists. Think the script had some obvious plot problems? Well, you're just a racist! (Or even a Russian troll.)

This had a threefold effect - first, it cemented in the critics' minds that they must be right about The Last Jedi (which they largely liked, specifically because it deconstructed what made Star Wars what it was); it also allowed them to turn it into a liberal vs. conservative political issue (which it most certainly isn't - yes, critics, you did that, not the fans, and I'm telling you this as a liberal Democrat). And it poisoned the well, changing expectations among those same critics and also some of the more casual fans for what the final film in the new trilogy would be. Some of them even seemed to root for the rest of what we know and love about the series to be torn down. I mean, what the actual fuck, guys?

So here we finally are with The Rise of Skywalker, the last film in the "Skywalker Saga" as it's now called, launching into this poisonous environment, where a lot of people are going to hate it no matter what. It's the close of what is for me personally a 40+ year journey through these films. It was going to take a lot to satisfy me, and there's just a lot of emotional weight there - it's (supposedly) really the end of something I've lived with for basically as long as I can remember anything. I've known Star Wars almost as long as I knew my parents.

And man, did this movie deliver! It is everything I wanted as a Star Wars fan. It fixed basically all the problems The Last Jedi introduced - at least to the point it could. It's basically JJ Abrams saying "ignore all that other bullshit; this is Star Wars in its purest form, just as you remember it." I laughed, I cried. (It's true!) At the end I clapped, as the entire audience did.

I'm not going to give away spoilers as I have for the other films, just because this one's new. But I just don't see how you can watch this movie, as a Star Wars fan, and say "meh, I was expecting more." More what?! On the other hand, some critics - and some fans - have criticized the movie for trying too hard to cover all the bases. My question to them is, what's wrong with that?! This is the end of the series - there are no more films to cover any bases that need covering! And this is one of the very few endings to anything that I can remember where - at least from what I can think of - all the answers were provided to everything you ever wanted to know (but, unlike Solo, for example, nothing you didn't). And it did that in a really satisfying, uplifting and fulfilling way.

In other words, the movie is total fanservice. As it should be!

This is not "toxic fandom", this is just fandom. Nobody calls fandom "toxic" when Marvel or DC movies give the fans what they want - why is Star Wars held to a different standard? The fans are the audience for these films - if they're not made for us, who are they made for?

Some people act as as if those of us who've spent 40+ years with this series would want anything but what amounts to a love letter to the fans, or deserve anything less. We are the ones who financed Star Wars! We are responsible for the series reaching a ninth numbered film! Not the naysayers and critics. It is our money that justified every single sequel since the original movie. The Rise of Skywalker is a Star Wars movie through and through, made for the fans, packing in more references, homages, and literally all of the major characters from every episodic Star Wars movie into one mega meta-Star Wars extravaganza. And it's awesome!

My wife told me after the movie ended that she thought those who didn't like it "have crossed to the dark side." She was joking, but I genuinely think she's right. You'd almost have to be a cynical, angry and/or depressed asshole to not like this movie, expecting a continuation of Rian Johnson's "subversion" of audience expectations ("most film plots have a point, so let's make one that doesn't!") that was out of place in the second-to-last film in this series and would be even moreso in the final film of all. All I can do is roll my eyes at those people. You're choosing a film that tears everything down not just about Star Wars but about basic storytelling in general over one that's as well-crafted as any blockbuster I've ever seen and presents an uplifting message that literally made everybody in my row of the theater verklempt. Sorry, but you're on the wrong side. You're the bad guys!

I mean, look - again, I spent four years getting a degree in cinema studies. I am a film critic by training. Which is just to say that by nature, I love challenging films. I love subversive films. And I've certainly seen my share of them, by choice. I believe that cinema is the art of the modern era. But Star Wars is not those things, at least not primarily. (I do think The Rise of Skywalker is more artistic than any other Star Wars film, but "artistic" actually means "like art" - whether it actually is art would be something I'd need to think and write about a lot longer than this.)

And I love it more than almost anything anyway. It is its own thing - almost a genre to itself. Don't expect The Rise of Skywalker to be otherwise, don't see it and end up disappointed that it does exactly what it sets out to do, and don't critique it as something it's not trying to be. That doesn't help anybody. And it doesn't make you sound smart. It just makes you sound like somebody who doesn't like fun, doesn't want to be uplifted, and hates everything that other people like. In other words, it makes you sound like a dope. Stop it.