#50. 1917, Cigar Smoking, and More Star Wars!

1917 opens at number one with $37 million and produces the show's most heated argument in months. JVL is transported, telling the others it's the first time in maybe fourteen years he has sat in a theater and felt he was watching cinematic greatness unspool in front of him; he saw it on the Alamo's Big Show screen, nearly went back the same night for a second viewing, calls it a top-five war movie of all time and easily the best film of the year, and insists nothing in Sam Mendes's corpus — not Jarhead, not Revolutionary Road, not even Skyfall — suggested he had this in him. Vic gives it an A-plus-plus and layers in the history, placing it between the second and third battles of Ypres with the Germans pulled back to the Hindenburg line, admiring the English mugs of George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman, spotting the limestone of champagne country in the final trenches, and joking that the war's real tragedy was the lost 1914-to-1918 vintages. Sonny, having warned off in advance from any Scorsese-style troll job, holds firm that it's a gimmick movie: he spent the whole runtime hunting for the seams and predicting which camera swoop would hide a cut, and he reads the star cameos as video-game exposition dumps and chapter markers, with Benedict Cumberbatch as a final boss "slain with rhetoric." He still praises Roger Deakins, hopes he wins, and singles out the post-blackout sequence in the burning city as his favorite in the film, though he'd still rank Once Upon a Time in Hollywood higher. JVL's grand theory that the officer cameos dramatize the amateur aristocratic British officer corps gets dismantled point by point — Colin Firth, Mark Strong and Cumberbatch are all portrayed as competent and decent, Sonny notes, so "this is not Paths of Glory" — but JVL still gets to deliver his real thesis, that 1917 and Dunkirk are bookend films about the British experience of the two wars that ended the Empire, and that the Great War, not the Second, is the underappreciated event that broke liberalism. They also relish the Vulture piece on the production: the farmhouse was built from scratch in a field, nearly a mile of trench was dug with the length calibrated to the pace of the dialogue, and in one shot the camera operators become extras. Earlier, the leaked summary of Colin Trevorrow's discarded Duel of the Fates script gets savaged — Sonny closed the tab the instant he read that Rose Tico gets a bigger role, and JVL walks through the Lovecraftian 7,000-year-old ghoul Tor Valum and Kylo's face healed with smelted Mandalorian armor — which becomes JVL's argument that The Last Jedi was Star Wars' Donald Trump election, splitting the fan base so thoroughly that its rejection could never be clean. Sonny goes further, suggesting the film franchise may simply be unsalvageable, with both agreeing that if anything reunites the fandom it will be Baby Yoda. Up front, Vic's croaking voice is explained by hours in a cigar lounge with listeners Adam Novak, Jim Swift, Andrew Nearing and Thomas Hebert, a Montecristo and a Macanudo that left him lingering like Pig-Pen for days, followed by a self-audit prompted by a Wall Street Journal piece on rising heart disease — a 22-ounce bone-in ribeye ("so it's really only like 16"), red wine as medicine, and a lunchtime martini offset by ordering fish for the omega-3s. Sonny, eight days from his move to Dallas, reports throwing out roughly a thousand pounds of possessions, and Vic closes by ambushing JVL with an invitation to come speak at Georgetown.