Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2018 i Empire Australasia

SO, HERE HE is once more. Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool — DP to his friends, Mr Pool to you — back for another round of merry mutant mayhem. No quip too big, no inside joke too small. Fourth walls will never be the same again. Deadpool 2 will follow in the footsteps of its postmodern predecessor by casting a sideways glance — or, if you will, cocking a snook — at the conventions and clichés of comic-book movies. As evidenced by our exclusive pic, in which Reynolds’ Wade Wilson appears to have finally joined the X-Men, alongside would-be team-mates Colossus (Stefan Kapicic) and Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand). But look more closely, and you’ll see he’s just wearing an X-Men T-shirt over his regular costume. Which sums up the character, and…

WHAT MIGHT A BATGIRL MOVIE LOOK LIKE? After working on it for over a year, Joss Whedon has quit Batgirl — the long-mooted DC movie focused on Barbara Gordon, the daughter of Commissioner Gordon who dons her own Batsuit — saying he “didn’t have a story”. But there are plenty to choose from, if the project continues. Gail Simone’s psychologically dark run of the comics saw a PTSD-suffering Batgirl recovering her mojo after being shot through the spine by the Joker (in Alan Moore’s infamous The Killing Joke). Scott Beatty and Chuck Dixon’s Batgirl: Year One is a lighter affair and gives us a fresh origin story. And Hope Larson’s recent series in the DC Rebirth line presents a Batgirl still in college, should the DCEU be looking for some…

What character were you in your first school play? I was a potato. It was a play about nutrition. I don’t know how good I was in it. I didn’t work again for a long time after that. When were you most starstruck? By Ani DiFranco, who is my favourite singer, a folk singer. Also Anjelica Huston. My sister and I ran into her at an event once and we could not form an interesting sentence. We basically just said, “We love you!” and stared at her. Do you have a signature dish? No. I can cook maybe 10 things, but I don’t. I married a chef, though, so I can continue to not cook those 10 things. What is the worst smell in the world? Rotting flesh. Rotting human…

1 __ The Irishman — the 25th film from director Martin Scorsese, and his first Mob movie in over a decade — has completed principal photography, after six months of filming, the longest shoot of his career. 2 __ Scorsese has been linked to the project for years. Adapted from the book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt, it tells the story of Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran, a real-life union official turned Mob hitman, allegedly responsible for the unexplained disappearance of Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa. 3 __ Robert De Niro plays the Irishman in the title, heading up one of the most impressive casts, well, ever, including Al Pacino (as Hoffa), Harvey Keitel (as Philadelphia Mob boss Angelo Bruno), and the newly unretired Joe Pesci (as Sheeran’s mentor,…

★★★★ OUT 17 MAY / 105 MINS RATED TBC DIRECTORS Ben Howling, Yolanda Ramke CAST Martin Freeman, Anthony Hayes, Susie Porter, Natasha Wanganeen, David Gulpilil, Simone Landers, Kris McQuade PLOT In a world destroyed by a pandemic that turns people into zombies, a father who has been bitten races against time to find a new family for his daughter before he begins to hunger for human flesh. BASED ON THEIR short film of the same name, directing duo Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke have taken tried and tested genre tropes in their feature debut and delivered an emotional rollercoaster ride set in the Australian Outback that combines Indigenous culture with a 28 Days Later-style pandemic, albeit with shuffling rather than sprinting infected. Beautifully shot by Geoffrey Simpson (Shine, Oscar And…

★★★★ OUT 10 MAY / 106 MINS RATED M DIRECTOR John Curran CAST Jason Clarke, Ed Helms, Kate Mara, Jim Gaffigan, Bruce Dern PLOT The dramatic true story of the tragic events on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 that saw a presidential campaign derailed and a young woman killed after a car was driven off a bridge by senator Ted Kennedy (Jason Clarke). A HUGE INSPIRATION on Brian De Palma’s brilliant paranoia-drenched 1981 thriller Blow Out, the tragic true events on Chappaquiddick Island on Friday 18 July, 1969, on which this enthralling biopic is based, marked the end of another chapter in the tumultuous political careers of the Kennedy clan after older siblings JFK and Bobby both had their lives shockingly taken away from them when the former was assassinated in…

POP QUIZ HOTSHOT. Name the first two films directed by John Krasinski prior to A Quiet Place. No? Don’t worry, we had to IMDb it too. There might be a number of reasons why the David Foster Wallace adaptation Brief Interviews With Hideous Men and ensemble comedy The Hollars didn’t catch fire whereas Krasinki’s third feature has found favour (eg: they were rubbish). One reason might be genre. A Quiet Place is yet another example of the horror film’s ability to shine (a sickly green) light on directorial talent and chutzpah. After all, it’s not just Krasinski who is getting heat from fear-fests. Recently Jennifer Kent (The Babadook), Robert Eggers (The Witch), Anna Biller (The Love Witch), Corin Hardy (The Hallow), and the Oscar-winning Jordan Peele (Get Out) all proved…

HAYAO MIYAZAKI, THE animation genius behind some of Studio Ghibli’s greatest hits, doesn’t write scripts. By his own account he starts production before he’s even finished storyboarding, with the plot unfolding as he gets his animators rolling, which somewhat explains the dream logic that informs Spirited Away. Of course our hero’s parents would be turned into pigs; of course she would share a lift with a giant radish spirit; of course a boy would also be a dragon who is in fact a river. The whole magical adventure is conducted with such a sure hand, and such a detailed sense of place and character, that you never question its weirder aspects. And the story turns weird, and wyrd, fast, and only gets more bizarre until about a minute before the…

IT ALL BEGAN with a falling scalpel. As a kid, Christopher Nolan had watched and loved the 1966 sci-fi adventure Fantastic Voyage, in which a crew of experts and their hi-tech submarine are shrunk to the size of a microbe and enter the body of a dying scientist. While they travel along his ear canal, a normal-sized surgeon in the operating room drops his knife, its clatter having catastrophic consequences for the teensy crew within. “That is a great moment,” Nolan says. “I always loved the idea of something in a larger-scaled world having a cataclysmic effect on this smaller world beneath.” Which is why, in the summer of 2009, Joseph Gordon-Levitt spent the best part of a week in a near-derelict former airship hangar in Bedfordshire performing a frantic,…

LEE UNKRICH: “Anybody who follows me on Twitter knows that I love The Shining . It’s my favourite movie. The scene where Jack Nicholson is slowly backing Shelley Duvall through the big Colorado lounge and she’s just swinging her bat at him is just a great example of a slow-burn. You don’t know where that scene is going, but you feel such immense dread the whole time.” INT. OVERLOOK HOTEL LOBBY — DAY Corrupted by the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains, novelist-turned-caretaker Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) has gone dangerously insane, and is now stalking his terrified wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) through the hotel’s lobby. Holding him at bay with a baseball bat, she begins to back up the grand staircase… WENDY: I’m very…

CHRISTOPHER McQUARRIE REMEMBERS the moment distinctly. Tom Cruise had just completed his final pass on the big stunt that became the basis of Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation (you know the one; bloke strapped to the side of a plane as it takes off), and a relieved McQuarrie turned to his cinematographer, Robert Elswit, with a simple observation. “I said, ‘I feel sorry for the poor son of a bitch who directs Mission: Impossible 6,’” laughs McQuarrie, who shortly thereafter became his own punchline by agreeing to return for Mission: Impossible — Fallout. And the second he signed on the line that is dotted, thoughts turned to the spectacular as he and Cruise attempted to outdo themselves. “On this one, there was the constant search for The Stunt,” admits McQuarrie.…

MARTIN SHEEN IS PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP Sure, Alec Baldwin’s Saturday Night Live impression is better known. But what could be more shocking and eye-catching than the former President Bartlet dispatching angry tweets about Crooked Hillary between mouthfuls of cheeseburgers? ZACH GALIFIANAKIS IS STEVE BANNON It takes a very specific actor to embody the former Chief Strategist’s “American carnage”. Only Galifianakis can convincingly provide the dishevelled look, the unpredictability, and the slight air of derangement that the role requires. CATE BLANCHETT IS KELLYANNE CONWAY The Counselor To The President requires a skilled operator at the wheel. Enter Oscar-winner Blanchett, an actor bold and brave enough to conjure up fictional massacres with merry abandon, or invent the ingenious concept of “alternative facts”.…

WHEN PIXAR’S SUPERHERO adventure The Incredibles was first released in 2004, the genre landscape was very different. Iron Man was four years away; the Avengers were yet to assemble; Batman Begins hadn’t even begun. “Since then, there’s been roughly 600,000 superhero films,” chuckles Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles and its forthcoming sequel. “You can’t throw a rock without hitting a superhero. The turf has been trodden endlessly.” Which makes Incredibles 2, following-up after a gap of 14 years, something of a challenge in a crowded marketplace. But Bird, who dipped his toes into live action with Tomorrowland and Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol in the interim, seems up for it. “How do you do something fresh? Our answer is pretty simple: I was never particularly enamoured with the superpowers.…

DIRECTOR ARI ASTER calls his debut feature “a family film”. But — and we cannot stress this enough — do not take kids to see this. Or anyone without a cast-iron constitution. Because this “family film” is going to be the most talked-about horror movie of the year. Aster uses the term because Hereditary is about family and the connections they share, emotionally and genetically, whether they like it or not. It centres on the Grahams. Annie Graham’s (Toni Collette) mother has recently died, which she and her family — husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), son Peter (Alex Wolff) and daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) — are taking oddly. As bizarre and terrifying things begin to happen, they discover more about their family line and realise being a Graham may actually be…

★★★★ OUT NOW RATED M / 115 MINS DIRECTOR Simon Baker CAST Simon Baker, Elizabeth Debicki, Samson Coulter, Ben Spence, Megan Smart, Richard Roxburgh, Rachael Blake PLOT In a small coastal town in 1970s Australia, surf-loving teens Pikelet (Coulter) and Loonie (Spence) meet enigmatic older surfer Sando (Baker) and his troubled wife, Eva (Debicki). The boys are soon taken under the wing of Sando, who seems intent on pushing the pair to their physical limits. CURRENTLY BASED IN Australia after several years spent abroad conquering Hollywood in both films (The Devil Wears Prada, L.A. Confidential, ) and hit television programs (The Guardian, The Mentalist), Ballina-bred actor Simon Baker seems to have thrown himself a none-more-Aussie homecoming party with Breath, his feature film directorial debut. Based on Tim Winton’s popular novel…

★★★★ OUT 10 MAY RATED TBC / 96 MINS DIRECTOR Jason Reitman CAST Charlize Theron, Mackenzie Davis, Ron Livingston, Mark Duplass PLOT Fortysomething mother of three Marlo (Theron) finds it so hard to cope with her newborn daughter she finally agrees to her “rich asshole” brother’s offer to pay for a night nanny. Enter Tully (Davis), a weirdly perfect 26-year-old Mary Poppins who not only gives Marlo a lifeline, but also makes her pine for her long-lost youth. WHEN MOVIES AREN’T perpetuating the saccharine myth of the ‘magic’ of childbirth, they often present everyday, mid-life domesticity as something to be escaped, usually via flight to some exotic location or through the sexual reawakening of an extramarital affair. Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman’s Tully locates us in a dramatically satisfying middle…

★★★★ OUT 31 MAY / 110 MINS RATED MA15+ DIRECTOR Nash Edgerton CAST David Oyelowo, Joel Edgerton, Charlize Theron, Sharlto Copley, Amanda Seyfried PLOT On a work trip to Mexico with his bosses (Edgerton, Theron), put-upon, strait-laced businessman Harold Soyinka (Oyelowo) makes a rash decision that triggers a series of unfortunate events. BACK WHEN PULP Fiction ‘homages’ were all the rage, a young Charlize Theron made her mark as a fearsome, sexually aggressive schemer in 2 Days In The Valley, one of the very best of all the sub-Tarantino flood of movies that thrust a group of seemingly unconnected characters into a circuitous crime plot. That flood has since slowed to a trickle, but every now and then along comes a movie forged in QT’s image.…

★★★ OUT 17 MAY/ 108 MINS RATED TBC DIRECTOR Michel Hazanavicius CAST Louis Garrel, Stacy Martin, Bérénice Bejo PLOT France, 1968: filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard (Garrel) is fêted the world over and newly married to the far younger actress Anne Wiazemsky (Martin). His marriage and career fade in importance to him as he becomes more interested in revolution. JAMES JOYCE GAVE us Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man; The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius here looks at arthouse hero Jean-Luc Godard and gives us ‘Portrait Of The Artist As An Insufferable Nightmare’. The source material is a book by Godard’s former wife, a sad story of a young woman learning narcissists are incapable of love. There’s a certain iconoclastic glee in how Redoubtable presents one of the monstres sacrés of…

★★★ OUT NOW RATED M / 107 MINS DIRECTOR Brad Peyton CAST Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, Malin Åkerman, Jake Lacy, Jeffrey Dean Morgan PLOT A shady technology company develops a process that turns innocent animals into giant killer monsters. Unfortunately, their serum infects the wrong animals, including the gorilla pal of zoologist Davis Okoye (Johnson), putting the entire world at risk. IN HOLLYWOOD, IF you have a really dumb idea for a movie and a lot of money to make it, you call The Rock. That’s not intended as an insult; the guy is just the industry’s greatest salesman. Two hundred and 60 pounds of oiled muscles and oil-free charisma, he can sell you things you thought you actively did not want: a Jumanji reboot, sequels to G.I. Joe and…

★★★★ NETFLIX OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED ALL CREATED BY Barry Sonnenfeld, Mark Hudis CAST Neil Patrick Harris, Patrick Warburton, Malina Weissman, Louis Hynes, Nathan Fillion, Roger Bart PLOT They’ve survived snakes, leeches and whirring buzz-saws. But the beleaguered Baudelaire orphans are in for a whole heap of further trouble, as they continue to be pursued by the fortune-hungry Count Olaf (Harris) and meet an equally sly new foe. LAST YEAR WE got the sordid start of the tale of the Baudelaire orphans. And now along comes the menacing middle: 10 episodes, two apiece dedicated to the book created by verbose wordsmith Daniel Handler. This will be the longest of the three seasons and though we’re now into territory uncharted on screen, this is the one most likely to test a…

3,720 TO ONE. These, as any Last Exit To Nowhere T-shirt-sporting geek could tell you, are the (approximate) odds of Han Solo successfully navigating an asteroid field, according to C-3PO in The Empire Strikes Back. For the cast and crew of Solo: A Star Wars Story, it also must have felt like the odds of meeting their May 2018 release date. As the world knows, 22 Jump Street’s Phil Lord and Chris Miller were dismissed mid-way through production. It became a production frozen in carbonite. Just nine months later, on a late March morning, Ron Howard, who took over the controls, is on buoyant form. With just two days of scoring left (John Powell has composed the music but Star Wars veteran John Williams has written Solo his first theme),…

Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody could not be more different Canadian-born director Reitman, son of Ghostbusters director Ivan, grew up in a minted film family — his baby pictures were taken on the set of National Lampoon’s Animal House. Writer Cody (born Brook Busey — she took the name ‘Diablo’, Spanish for ‘devil’, after repeatedly listening to El Diablo by Duran Duran side project Arcadia) had a modest but not impoverished upbringing in Chicago, Illinois, before her adventures as a blogger, feminist stripper and Entertainment Weekly columnist led her to Hollywood. But together, they have formed an indie dream team, pregnancy comedy Juno (2007) and mid-life-crisis tale Young Adult (2011) offering pointed, funny, candid takes on the pains and pangs of entering different life stages. Their third collaboration, Tully, continues…

WILLIAM FRIEDKIN SPENT the 1970s putting himself through the wringer. For the iconic car chase in The French Connection, he filmed a stunt driver tearing down real streets at 145 kilometres per hour, without a permit, a daredevil decision that could have backfired badly. The shoot for The Exorcist was so troubled that rumours spread it had been cursed by Satan himself. But rather than following those projects with a romantic comedy set in the south of France, Friedkin decided to embark on his most ambitious and uncomfortable adventure yet. A very loose re-imagining of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s French classic The Wages Of Fear, 1977’s Sorcerer would take Friedkin, cast and crew into the jungles of the Dominican Republic and Veracruz, Mexico, for a fraught shoot beset by illness, angry locals…

Achievement unlock: Exclusive Avengers: Infinity War Empire covers are all collected, thankfully not as difficult as collecting all the Infinity Stones. Six Thanoses sit in a row, ready for the Infinity War (and six magazines stands to use while watching the movie). I’m pumped! RUBY DONG, VIA EMAIL Empire readers: Assemble! Nice work, Ruby — you’ve got the covers in the correct order and everything. If we’re being honest though, Thanos’s floating space toilet is perhaps a tad cooler than the office chairs.(But only a tad.)…

NOBODY TRUSTS ANYONE anymore. Corporations control the world, conflict is commerce, and shady cabals pull the strings from the shadows. Deep State, a new eight-part, continent-straddling action thriller, tackles this head on, sticking us slap in the middle of a covert intelligence war. “Politics and business have become interwoven, and to find a script that deals with that was perfect,” says Mark Strong, who plays Max Easton, a British ex-spy thrown back into work. “It makes a difference if you can entertain people but at the same time get them asking themselves some difficult questions, because we’re living in strange times.” Last Summer, Empire braved the outskirts of Guildford, where a cabin in the woods was standing in for Virginia. A heavy siege was taking place. Inside, gearing up for…

AS THE TITLE may suggest, Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang isn’t going to have it all his own way in Ant-Man And The Wasp. As the exclusive concept art above proves, Marvel’s miniature hero will have an equally pixel-sized partner this time around, in the diminutive shape of Evangeline Lilly’s Hope van Dyne, last seen at the very tail end of 2015’s Ant-Man getting her wings, courtesy of her inventor dad, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). And one thing’s for sure: The Wasp is not going to be anybody’s sidekick. “It was important to me, in this movie called Ant-Man And The Wasp, that she’s not a supporting character,” director Peyton Reed tells Empire. “She’s a lead character. She’s become a fully-formed hero.” When Hope uttered the words, “About damn time” in…

FILMMAKER ANDREW HAIGH was never what you’d call a horsey person. Before making Lean On Pete, his intensely emotional coming-of-age story about a troubled 15-year-old Portland boy and a knackered racehorse, the Croydon-raised writer-director hadn’t had any experience with the beasts. So he was understandably anxious about directing one — in a double act with a teenager (Charlie Plummer), no less. “It sounds like it’s gonna be horrific,” says Haigh. But, it turns out, having a horse around makes for a surprisingly chilled film set. “They’re amazing animals when you spend time with them,” he says. “They really do sense your mood changes. Our horse, who was named Starsky, would sense the tone of the set. So it means everybody has to be calm.” Having made his name with affecting…

IT WILL SEE THE CAST RETURN The story of Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer) is not yet over. Speaking to the Empire Podcast, Chalamet and Hammer confirmed they would gladly return for any sequel. (Chalamet jokingly suggested it could be set “in space or underwater”, while Hammer pondered the terrifying prospect of the peach having a baby: “There are a bunch of half-human peaches running around. A bunch of pumans...”) IT WILL BE SET YEARS LATER On the Oscars red carpet, director Luca Guadagnino confirmed that he’s working on a Call Me By Your Name sequel, set five or six years after the original film. The director is writing with the original book’s author André Aciman. In the novel — spoiler alert — a 40-page epilogue sees a…

★★ OUT 31 MAY / 107 MINS RATED TBC DIRECTOR José Padilha CAST Rosamund Pike, Daniel Brühl, Eddie Marsan, Lior Ashkenazi PLOT The true story of a 1976 plane hijacking, which saw four anti-Israel terrorists take over an Air France flight and divert it to Uganda’s Entebbe Airport, where the crew and passengers were held hostage. ENTEBBE HAS A problem to solve. A familiar one, incidentally, to anyone who’s ever filmed the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Namely, how do you get around the issue that the action centrpiece to the film is over so quickly? Three minutes, in this case (while the O.K. Corral was done and dusted in just 30 seconds). John Sturges solved it by ignoring the truth and setting wagons on fire over his…

★★★★★ OUT 17 MAY RATED TBC / 143 MINS DIRECTOR Robin Campillo CAST Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Arnaud Valois, Adèle Haenel, Antoine Reinartz PLOT It’s the early ’90s, and AIDS is killing in droves. In Paris, activists take on the government and pharmaceutical business, conflicted on how to get results, but doing all they can to affect change. IN 2000, DISCUSSING Boogie Nights, pornography and drama, Paul Thomas Anderson lamented the lack of proper, honest sex scenes in traditional narrative film. “How does Forrest Gump have sex?” he asked, by way of example. “What could be more of a revelation about a character than watching them have sex? That says a lot about them, how they touch another person in bed.” BPM (Beats Per Minute) isn’t primarily about sex, nor…

★★★★ NETFLIX OUT NOW EPISODES VIEWED 1-4 DIRECTORS Jakob Verbruggen, James Hawes, Paco Cabexas, David Petrarca, Jamie Payne CAST Daniel Brühl, Luke Evans, Dakota Fanning, Brian Geraghty PLOT A series of grotesque murders of male prostitutes in 1890s New York prompts the police commissioner to sanction an investigation by criminal psychologist Dr Laszlo Kreizler (Brühl). But to avoid the wrath of the corrupt police force, he must conduct his enquiries in secret. NEW YORK IN the 1890s was a fine place to live. But only if you were fabulously wealthy. For the rest — the poor, or the droves of immigrants — it was a bleak existence. Dozens of people crowded together in the tiny rooms of unregulated tenement blocks; disease and death rampant. This is the world of the The…

OUT OF THE PAST (1947) Emilia Clarke’s Qi’ra is a quasi classic film noir femme fatale. “My favourite is probably Jane Greer from Out Of The Past,” says Lawrence Kasdan. “She sees things more clearly than Robert Mitchum does. And we wanted that quality for Qi’ra.” ADAM’S RIB (1949) One of Lawrence Kasdan’s instructions to his son was to imbue the Han-Chewie dynamic with some zingy Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn repartee. “When he said that, I thought, ‘That’s cool,’” says Jonathan Kasdan. “And then I thought, ‘How are we gonna do that if you can’t understand what the hell one of them says?’ But that became one of the great, fun challenges. One of the things I’m proud of is that for everything Chewie says, we wrote a line.” THE HOT…

“Are you gonna bark all day, little doggie Or are you gonna bite?” Lawrence Bender (producer): I first met Quentin at a summer party. Then we ran into each other again in the line for a 3D midnight screening of House Of Wax. He had already written this script called True Romance and said, “Next I’m gonna write a jewellery-heist thriller.” Roger Avary (friend of Tarantino/co-writer of Pulp Fiction ): Quentin and I were trying to get True Romance made, with him directing and me producing. We were running into roadblocks. One day, while walking around the Miracle Mile of Los Angeles, we discussed that it was cheaper and easier to get short films made, and if we got three filmmakers together and each of us made…

Brown Ambition “In those days, Quentin was just euphoric and on a natural high from being allowed to do what he wanted to do. He was flying on adrenaline. He was not only getting to make a movie, but he was starring in it too. His dream was to be an actor originally, so that was important to him. We all knew, both in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, that he was pretty terrible as an actor. But he didn’t care. He knew that he sucked, he knew that everyone else knew that he sucked, and he still wanted to be in it!” Gun Play “It looks like Tim [Roth] was so bored he was on the verge of suicide. You can see the prop guy on the floor behind…

00:08:13 BOMBS AWAY  __ Rian Johnson’s addition to the Star Wars pantheon kicks off with a sequence in which Resistance bombers attack a First Order Dreadnought, only for one to blow up and set off a chain reaction. “That’s an unavoidable flaw of having bombers,” says Johnson, who was inspired to introduce them after watching World War II flick Twelve O’Clock High. “Bombers were big, pregnant cows. Their flaw is also a B-52’s flaw.” 00:14:25 THROWAWAY GAG  __ J.J. Abrams’ The Force Awakens ended on a cliffhanger, with Rey (Daisy Ridley) handing a lightsaber to Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker. There was much speculation about what Luke would do. Turns out it was ‘toss it over his shoulder’. “Once I figured out where Luke’s head is at, I knew he would…

LUKE SKYWALKER IS dead. He is no more. He has ceased to be. He’s fucking snuffed it. At the end of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Tatooine farmboy-turned-withdrawn Jedi Knight did his Force projection thing to ward off Kylo Ren and light the spark that fans the flame that saves the Resistance and might down burn the First Order. And then, exhausted by the effort, he fades into nothingness, never to be seen again. Maybe. Mark Hamill, the man who brought Skywalker to life, is not fading away. The Last Jedi brings to an end his 41-year, five-movie association with the character, but Hamill is as vocal and visible as ever. As we found to our delight when we sat down with him to discuss, in true Hamill stream-of-consciousness…