Spoiler Alert – spoilers ahead for Andor, Bojack Horseman, Face/Off, Death of Stalin, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Darjeeling Limited.

Andor – “Rix Road”

The funeral of Maarva Carassi in Andor is an astonishing scene. A pillar of her local community people have turned out in droves, carrying out the customs of the area, including the deceased’s ashes being turned into a brick to be used in a building. However, the funeral is not without incident, with a holographic Maarva delivering a stirring call to action against the Empire. When an Imperial officer tries to turn off the projector another character hits him with a brick – the brick made from Maarva. Yes, at her funeral she instigated a riot and her ashes were used to beat the tar out of the henchmen of a totalitarian state.

Funeral rating 5 out of 5 bricks made of ashes

Bojack Horseman – “Free Churro”

This is an episode of the animated comedy show Bojack Horseman, the entire episode of which is dedicated solely to Bojack’s eulogy to his mother at her funeral. Now, to those not familiar with the show Bojack and his mother didn’t get along. The flashbacks throughout the show impart the horror she put him through as a child, constant cruelty, belittling and criticism. The episode title comes from a story Bojack tells at the eulogy that on his way to the funeral he got a free churro from a drive-through when he said his mother had died when they asked him how he was. Bojack doesn’t hold back in his eulogy, describing his mother’s flaws, his own, and so much of the awfulness of their relationship.

Funeral Rating 4 out of 5 free churros

Face/Off

An odd film of dubious artistic merits but it does have a classic John Woo style shoot out with doves, slow motion and all-around ridiculousness. It is hard to overstate the absolute sheer spectacular oddity of this scene, a film famous for encouraging Nicholas Cage to go Peak Weird Nicholas Cage and then throwing elaborately choreographed gun battles into the mix. There are shots of doves flying around paintings of the Virgin Mary while slow motion bullets erupt from guns. It wouldn’t be a sombre respectful funeral but it would be memorable.

Funeral Rating 2 out of 5 slow-motion flocks of doves

Wes Anderson

There are several funerals and memorials in Anderson’s films. There is the funeral of Royal Tenenbaum that ends The Royal Tenenbaums, with his tombstone given the epitaph “saving his family from the wreckage of a destroyed sinking battleship” – which is not at all how he died. Or Monsieur Gustave going to pay his respects to Dowager Countess Céline Villeneuve Desgoffe und Taxis in The Grand Budapest Hotel, congratulating her on her appearance despite being dead. Perhaps the most memorable is the funeral scene in The Darjeeling Limited. Three brothers have set off across India to find their mother and on the way witness a river accident where a child dies (they manage to save the others). The family ask the brothers to attend the funeral, which they do, which gives one of the great Anderson music moments, Strangers by The Kinks playing as they walk towards the funeral. Then the film cuts to the brothers attending the funeral of their father – or failing to, desperate to drive their father’s beloved car to the funeral the three brothers descend on the garage where it is being fixed, in a state of some agitation.

Funeral Rating – 3 out of 5 Symmetrical Funerals

Death of Stalin

Unsurprisingly this film features the lying in state and funeral of Joseph Stalin, and a surreal experience it is too. Whilst mourners walk past in droves the various senior members of the government form an honour guard around the dictator’s body and just bicker and plot. They argue about bishops and religion but as none of them are facing each other to talk, who ordered what is utterly lost in the confusion? The plot against Beria, the head of the KGB, is finalised while they’re literally carrying Stalin’s coffin.

Funeral Rating – 4 out of 5 communist dictators lying in state (but don’t want to congratulate Stalin so 0).

Also Read: The Unique Style of Wes Anderson

The post Epic Farewells: The Art of Memorable On-Screen Funerals appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

Recently for several weeks, I suffered from an odd form of cognitive mistake. Every Monday I would think to myself, “The new episode of Andor comes out on Monday” and then be very disappointed when I checked and it actually was released on a Wednesday. It seems high praise indeed when so eager to watch a show your mind will repeatedly deceive you. Andor is one of the best tv shows of 2022 and it might even be the best. For most people this was not expected, I certainly didn’t expect it. It’s a different kind of Star Wars, less about light sabres and more of what life is like under a totalitarian regime like the Empire.

Setting The Scene

Andor is a spin-off tv series from the film Rogue One, which featured Rebel Alliance officer Cassian Andor, and shows the story of how the rebels acquired the plans for the Death Star. Andor is set several years before Rogue One and at this point, Cassian is a bit of a crook but not part of the Rebel Alliance, although like most people where he lives, hates the Empire. With Andor we see the first steps of the formation of the Rebel Alliance with another central character being Senator Mon Mothma (seen in Return of the Jedi briefing the Alliance) who is working against the Empire. There is also the mysterious Luthen Rael, something like a criminal or maybe a key player in the resistance to the Empire, but whatever he truly is, he is demonstrated to be utterly ruthless.

Cassian Andor

Essentially the audience is seeing Cassian go from trouble-maker and criminal to becoming a full member of the Rebel Alliance, from being concerned only for himself and his small circle of friends and family to the wider problems facing the galaxy. Usually, Star Wars deals with huge storylines of galactic civil war, planets being obliterated and titanic struggles between good and evil. Andor is very different – at the start of the show the stakes seem to be set ridiculously low and the looming threat is not stormtroopers but incompetent security forces vaguely aligned with the Empire.

There are three stories which encapsulate Andor. The first, Cassian is recruited to rob the cash payroll from an imperial garrison, the second, Cassian finds himself imprisoned, and the third, the funeral of a prominent character. All three of them deal with the idea that is it better to slowly ground down the Empire over years, keeping your head down to avoid attention and having some measure of life, or to risk it in defiance, to risk it for your freedom and a better life? We see various characters in different situations decide the best thing is not to resist but to comply, hoping their obedience will lead to good things or at least not to draw the ire of the Empire. Each time this way of thinking is overturned, and each time they should have failed, the prison was inescapable, the garrison too well-defended, unarmed mourners standing up to stormtroopers.

The Imperial Security Bureau

Our window into the Empire is through something we’ve not seen much of so far, the Imperial Security Bureau, these white uniformed intelligence agents are charged with rooting out the enemies of the Empire. They are a collection of rigid, repressed, sinister bureaucrats, who as well as protecting the Empire are fighting their own battles for influence and power within the organisation. Most of the agents seem to have very linear minds which cause problems when dealing with small outbreaks of rebellion across the Empire, the exceptions seem to be Major Partagaz and Dedra Meero, an agent under his command. It is Dedra who leads the hunt for Cassian and others. The ISB is a very odd organisation, with many of their members pale and gaunt, even sickly looking, their sneering faces full of contempt and undeserved superiority.

A Community, Not A Backwater

A lot of the show takes place on the planet of Ferrix, this is where Cassian is living at the start of the show. A small, industrial site, on the fringes of Imperial power. Star Wars often has characters start on similar planets, Luke Skywalker on Tatooine, Rey on Jakku, and usually they just serve as a backwater place that the hero wants to leave. Whilst Cassian is indeed happy to travel, we see things about Ferrix we never see about some of these other planets. We see some of the cultures of the planet, the feeling of community, it can be a hard place to live but people are also proud of their home and their community. This is best exemplified in the funeral that happens in the series finale, we see a number of Ferrix traditions and important cultural signifiers that matter to people, the organisation the Daughters of Ferrix, an organisation of citizens that works for the community. This fully formed community is indicative of Andor as a whole, avoiding simple cliches for more engaging storytelling.

This article has barely scratched the surface of the layers and complexity of this show – I haven’t mentioned Kino Loy (Andy Serkis‘ amazing portrayal of a conflicted prisoner), Vel Sartha (Faye Marsay’s ruthless rebel), the bizarrely compelling Syril Karn, or Brasso, who in a few seconds became perhaps the most bad-ass character ever created. Andor is amazing. Watch it.

Also Read: Now That Disney Has Stated They Won’t Focus On Film Trilogies, What’s Next For Star Wars?

The post How Andor Surprised Everyone And Became (Arguably) The Best Show of 2022 appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.