Star Wars: The Force Awakens

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.  -- I Corinthians, 13:11

I was 9 or 10 when Star Wars came out.  Like everyone else I knew at that age, I saw the movie multiple times, wore the t-shirt, had the lunchbox, etc.  

But, hey, I grew out of it.  I didn't make a point of showing the movies to my kids, though I did make the 'Clone Wars' cartoons available and even TiVo'd the first few episodes of 'Star Wars: Rebels.'  Star Wars was just another property in the entertainment marketplace.

Walking out of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, then, I was a happy guy.  The movie offered an enjoyable time in the theater with my wife and kids.  It featured a more interesting and entertaining villain's arc than all three prequels put together.  It had lightsaber duels, space-fighters, yet another exploding Death Star, and even a nu-Yoda there at the end.  I didn't expect The Force Awakens to change my life, so I was happy simply to enjoy a derivative, yet entertaining, science fantasy / space opera.

Did it capture my imagination for more than a few minutes after leaving the theater?  No, but that's ok.  I'm a man now.  My children liked, and that's who Stars Wars has always been for, all along.

Ender's Game

Ender’s Game tanked in its theatrical release.  I’m not sure why.

The film, about a boy at a space-military academy for exceptional children, has engaging characters, an interesting story, and beautiful special effects.  What went wrong?

Perhaps it was the subject matter: children forced to fight both an alien menace and one another.  In a world in which we teach our children to stop bullying by reporting incidents to the nearest authority figure, Ender’s Game posits that the best way to stop a bully is to knock him down, then kick him in the ribs until his bones crack.

Perhaps it was the premise: adults manipulating children into becoming merciless, unstoppable, alien-killing prodigies.  It’s one thing to wield a magic wand against Ralph Fiennes.  It’s quite another to commit genocide.

Perhaps it was the subtext of that premise: adults are not to be trusted.  Since adults form critical consensi and make purchasing decisions, perhaps Ender’s Game antagonized the wrong demographic.

Whatever the reasons, all I can say is that Ender’s Game worked for me.  I cared about its hero, I enjoyed its action set-pieces, and I even got my socks folded.

Perhaps it’ll fare better on video.

Arbitrage; 42

Arbitrage

In Arbitrage, Richard Gere plays an SOB who lies, cheats, defrauds, and worse. Because he's Richard Gere, we root for him anyway.

Here's a film that practically defines star power and what it brings to a movie. Gere is so charismatic that even though we know he's (if not evil, then definitely) not good, we hope he's able to elude all the people out to get him by the dawn of the third act. We actually buy into his BS, and we sigh with relief when he evades one trap, only to grip our armrests when it appears he's about to walk into another. The film maintains the illusion with the help of outstanding supporting performances from Susan Sarandon, Tim Roth, Reg E. Cathey (of 'The Wire'), and Brit Marling (of the remarkable Another Earth).

I'm not usually a fan of rooting for the bad guy, but Arbitrage won me over. This is a fine film.

42

42 is a warmly lit, rousingly scored, respectful and loving hagiography of a great American. It features a female lead (Nichole Beharie, as Mrs. Robinson) so beautiful that two of my kids fell in love with her at first sight. Its lead, Chadwick Boseman as Jackie Robinson, radiates strength, courage, and athleticism. Its supporting cast, including a fine Harrison Ford as Dodgers owner Branch Rickey and personal favorite Alan Tudyk [NOTE: If you haven't seen Tucker& Dale vs. Evil by now, you are bad at being a movie buff.] as a villain, sell its world. That said, 42 is a journeyman film.


How do I mean? I mean it's a perfectly competent sports hagiography. Its protagonist, Jackie Robinson, appears to have no flaws. It evokes its era (mid-'40s) with attention to detail and an eye for perfect costuming. It's structured well, it tells an important story, and it moves right along. I liked it. But it isn't great. Its sets don't look inhabited. Its heroes are treated too reverently, its villains allowed no nuance. It just feels like product.

But hey, it's a good product. It tells an important story, and it told it well enough to keep my kids engaged 'til the end. That's a win in my book.

Edward James Olmos Double Feature!

The Green Hornet is one of those movies in which the villain shoots his right-hand man for no good reason, only to have his second-tier henchmen drag the body away and charge into battle.  You've got to wonder how that works.  I mean, let's say you're a henchman.  You're talking to your headhunter and weighing competing offers from Hank Scorpio and the villain from this movie.  Scorpio offers a free dental plan and contributes to your 401(k).  This guy offers you a speedy climb up the ladder, followed by a quick and violent death if you happen to catch him on a bad day.  I don't know about you, but I'm going with Scorpio.

The worst thing about this villain is that we've seen so many like him.  Yes, The Green Hornet is an action-comedy, so he's made silly (and Christoph Waltz sells the material), but he's just lazily written, as are the other villains, the heroes, and even Edward James Olmos as Gravitas Guy.  In fact, the whole thing feels lazy and shambling, including the car chases and the ‘splosions.  I did enjoy how The Green Hornet paints its star as an unrelenting doofus and his sidekick, Kato, as the bright and competent one, but even that joke got boring after the first fifteen iterations.

Now, Blade Runner, on the other hand: there's a movie.  A sci-fi noir, it offers an intriguing vision of the future, tackles big questions, and creates sufficient ambiguity for thirty years' worth of conversations.

Blade Runner takes place in Los Angeles, 2019 (!).  It's January or February because it's raining, it gets dark early, and its characters can get away with wearing trench coats when they want to look cool.  In this future, short-lived artificial humans known as "replicants" serve as slave labor in the offworld colonies.  Sometimes, they escape and make their way back to Earth.  Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckard, the titular Blade Runner.  His job is to hunt down runaway replicants and kill them.  Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) is a replicant, but he's stronger, faster, smarter than most.  He's angry because he feels that he was created only to suffer and die.  He wants to face his Creator.  He wants to beg for more years.  He wants to know why he was made.  He wants to lash out.

Even with the unavoidable anachronisms of an older science-fiction property, Blade Runner's world looks and feels futuristic enough to entice the imagination.  There might be slavery on the offworld colonies, but at least there are offworld colonies.  The clothes look different from contemporary fashion, yet they still look like clothes actual people might wear.  Best of all (and like Scott's classic Alien), we can imagine actually living in this world.  We can imagine what it smells like, sounds like. Yes, Blade Runner has flying cars.  But they make sense, and they belong.  [Note: here's a neat little appreciation for Blade Runner's F/X work from Popular Mechanics.]  

The best science fiction, of course, is philosophy or social criticism made up to look like a genre tale.  Blade Runner is more the former, and how.  It's an existential shout at God, asking, "Why am I here?  Why is life so short?  Why do we suffer?"  It mourns the idea of death.  Read Roy Batty's dying words:  "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."  Who hasn't despaired in the face of the transience of beauty, of the fleeting nature of joy?  'Of course there's an afterlife,' we tell ourselves.  'Otherwise, all of this would go to waste.'  But if there isn't, oh, oh.

Of course, I'm a guy who welcomes seeing a film as an invitation to explore 2500 years of Western philosophical tradition; but I get that I'm in the minority.  Blade Runner also offers something for people who just like a good mystery.  First, there's the mystery that drives the plot as we're actually sitting in the chair: who are the replicants, where are they, and what do they want?  For coffee afterward, the film leaves open the question of Deckard's identity.  He might be a replicant.  His memories, his history might be implanted.  This ambiguity is baked into the film: Ford says he thought Deckard was human, while director Ridley Scott thought otherwise.  On a related note, what does the Edward James Olmos character know, what does he think about it, and what will he do?  This is chewy, fun stuff: the kind of material that's fuelled many a late-night bull session over the years.

To sum up, Blade Runner is a classic, a masterpiece.  Even if Ridley Scott hadn't made Alien or Thelma and Louise or Black Hawk Down, we'd know his name for this film alone.  Even if you've seen it, even if you love it, it'll be worth your time to see it again.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

The very worst thing about INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL is John Hurt. Hurt plays an old friend and colleague of the Joneser, one who has lost his wits after peering too deeply into the eponymous Crystal Skull. The problem with this is that Hurt's performance recalls his Fool in the 1982 BBC production of KING LEAR. Attention filmmakers: if you want to drive a stake through the heart of your movie, cast a great character actor in a pale shadow of one of his career-high performances. It's a sure-fire way to get your audience thinking about how much better that other picture was than the one it's currently watching.

That may be the worst thing about Indy IV, but it has competition. The opening sequence, a car chase between people we don't care about and whom we'll never see again (punctuated with supposedly amusing animal reaction shots), starts the film on an offputting, wtf note. When the picture finally gets around to giving us Ford and Ray Winstone (clearly wishing he was in Ibiza), we've already nearly lost interest. Then Cate Blanchett shows up as the villain, she gets a boner joke, and the whole thing just runs off the rails.

Ok, I admit it. I wrote that whole paragraph just to find an excuse to work in a SEXY BEAST joke.

INDY IV is just plain boring. Dull. Flaccid. A yawner. And I like Spielberg. I like Ford. I like Allen, Winstone, LaBeouf, Blanchett, and Hurt. But my pulse never quickened. I never believed in what was happening. And at the climax, when I was supposed to be going, "Wow," I was only thinking, "Huh. Spielberg and Lucas didn't trust me enough to have the Blanchett speak Russian."

I may have seen this one for free, but I still want $10 back. For my time.

Return of the Jedi

RETURN OF THE JEDI is the film where the wheels came right off the Star Wars franchise’s cart.

It begins promisingly enough, with an all-grown-up Luke ready to wield the lightsaber in defense of his friends and general goodness. But before you know it, we’re back in another Death Star attack, somebody shrunk the Wookies, and after all this time we find out that Darth Vader is just another old fat guy. This movie has absolutely nothing going for it in terms of character or plot, and the only response it can wring from us is a sense of discomfort over Luke & Leia’s earlier flirtatiousness.

My boy’s going through a huge Star Wars phase right now, but I can’t go there with him. I love, love, love the first Star Wars movie, conveniently entitled STAR WARS: it’s everything an adventure film should be. Nothing else, unfortunately, comes close.

The Empire Strikes Back

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK is a perfectly fine movie, but I have one major problem with it: it isn’t really a movie. It’s two-thirds of a movie, with a great buildup to a third act that never actually happens.

I know, I know, EMPIRE existed to serve up RETURN OF THE JEDI, but I don’t care. Films should exist on their own, as self-contained entities, even if those entities exist as part of a larger whole. Even if we know another film is coming, we should walk out of the theater satisfied with the narrative experience. EMPIRE forces us to do without that satisfaction, however, leaving us with a cliffhanger that leaves so much unresolved that we feel we wasted our time in watching it.

Some people feel that EMPIRE is best of all the Star Wars films. These are the kind of people who think that all buildup with no payoff is a good thing. As for me, give me my climax and send me home happy.

Presumed Innocent

Here's another one from Joe McDonald:

If there was ever a movie that dealt with the compromising of integrity in as many shades of grey as "Presumed Innocent" does, then I would like to know: ****.

"PI" is the story of district attorney Rusty Sabich (Harrison Ford) whose former mistress, Carolyn Polhemus (Greta Scacchi), is a gorgeous co-worker who is murdered. To say the plot thickens when we discover that she has also had an affair with Ford's supervisor (Brian Dennehy), who assigns Ford to her murder case, is to only begin to unravel the Pandora's box that Polhemus' death creates. Sabich is still whipped on her and his wife sees that, he is less than enthusiastic to assume responsibility for this case which his boss thrust on him, and then lo and behold, he becomes the prime suspect. To boot, we have missing evidence, the presiding judge's connection to Polhemus, and the prosecuting attorneys unseemly connection to Sabich's office.

The situation is a complete mess, and yet the script is written with an airtight clarity that makes us care about our flawed protagonist and understand the layers of agendas that permeate this movie. This is one of Ford's most underappreciated performances. He is spellbound by a seductive, enticing woman with an agenda, but he he is a man of principle as well. We see the exact moment when his principles lose her attraction, and his erotic fix is lost forever. He is a lost puppy, thereafter.

If Scacchi, on the other hand, could mass produce, bottle and market her sexuality, she could retire after six months. She is sumptuous, power hungry, tragic, and maybe just a tad bit kind-hearted. Wow. And finally, I am so sorry to see Raul Julia and his magnetic performance as Sabich's defense attorney. This was one of his most memorable roles before he died in 1994. He is the straw that stirs the drink once he is hired: measured, well studied, sympathetic, never expends more energy than needed, but strikes hard and effectively when the iron is hot.

This is one of the best courtroom drama I have even seen. And the ending turned me upside down; once I thought it ended, it resurrected itself for just a little longer. Sad, tragic, brilliant.

Star Wars

STAR WARS is easily the best film in the franchise. While THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK usually garners more recognition, there's something about this first film that's so compelling, it's sense of wonder carries us through five inferior follow-ups.

You know how it begins: "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away ..." That's a great fairy tale setup, playing with our expectations by switching "galaxy" for "kingdom." But make no mistake: a fairy tale this is: you've got your farmboy who dreams of greatness, your princess in distress, your wizard, your pirate, even your trusty dog and heartless villain. You've got magic, swashbuckling, romance, even a little comedy relief, all wrapped up in a shiny sci-fi package to fool us into thinking we're actually seeing something new.

But even though we know better, we can still delight in the wonderful execution of this rightfully classic film. Its breathlessness and sense of adventure, its eager desire to please, and its genuinely likeable cast invite us along for the ride. And what a ride it is, filled with everything we could want from an adventure movie.

The film even ends with appropriate dash, jauntily saying that, yes, it has done everything it intended to do. What a delight, and what a pleasure to discover that, even after all these years, STAR WARS still delivers.

The Conversation

Much has been written about the logic of THE CONVERSATION, about its perspectives and its relationship with its own filmed reality. If you're interested in that kind of analysis, Google is a wonderful thing. I'm interested in how the movie feels.

THE CONVERSATION, set in San Francisco, is a wonderfully noir thriller with a hero unlike anything from Hammet's typewriter. Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who suffers from insecurity, indecisiveness, and, crucially, inability to act at the key moment. Caul has recorded a conversation whose implications, he believes, may lead to murder. Since this is noir, his bumbling investigation leads him from clue to betrayal to doubt to clue to betrayal to doubt to, well, it's Chinatown, Jake.

The great thing about this film is its sense of the slow burn. This movie doesn't feature intimidating albinos, digital countdowns, or waving guns. Rather, it features a man who feels doors slowly being shut around him, villains who hold corporate positions, friends who can't be trusted, and more questions than answers. It's the kind of movie that builds dread and desperation in equal measure. By the time it gets to its devastating closing shot, we feel as lost as Caul.

Francis Ford Coppola has made some brilliant pictures in his time. THE CONVERSATION is right up there with them. I enthusiastically recommend it.