Friend of the Gutter Jessica Ritchey has a lovely piece on The Last Jedi. “The mythic cliffhanger of The Force Awakens is what I needed in 2015 at the end of a brutal year. The grumpy, startling conclusion of that cliffhanger is what I needed in 2017. Stories, and lives, don’t end neatly or go the way you want. How you react to that is how you make a life and leave a legacy in turn. I keep thinking of this exchange from Rio Bravo in relationship to this film. ‘A game legged old man, a kid and drunk, that’s all you’ve got?’ ‘That’s what I’ve got.’ And I remember how I groaned when I was little when my father spotted a western channel surfing and I knew we were going to be stuck watching that. How it wasn’t until it was too late to tell him that I finally clicked with watching westerns. And how it’s always too late in the end, but you keep going anyway.”