Sometimes Goin' "Solo" is The Most Fun You Can Have

One of the many questions that has been asked by those who are not tithe-giving members of the Church of Lucasfilm over the last year or two (and quite loudly, by some) about this film is “Do we really NEED a Han Solo stand-alone movie?”  Well, the honest answer to that is No, but it’s also an honest answer to the question “Do we really ever need ANY movie?” We didn’t know we NEEDED Star Wars in the first place until His Lucas-ness gave it to us. Lots of things in life that give us joy are things we never sought in the first place, but we couldn’t imagine life without them once fate dropped them in our laps.  

So regardless of any question of "need," we now have it - Solo: A Star Wars Story.  Fired directors, Oscar-winner replacement director, that dragon-lady chick from “Game of Thrones,” an actor who doesn’t look like Harrison Ford, no Jedi Knights, no lightsabers, no Darth Vader… Geez, how in the hell can this possibly work???  Lemme, tell ya, folks - it DOES work in being exactly what it needs to be. You may wish it were something more, but if that's the case, then it's on you, not this movie.

Ron Howard, the first Oscar-winning director to helm a Star Wars film, has made a movie that meets the first requirement of any summer blockbuster-with-popcorn flick - it’s FUN.  Does it answer any great mysteries about the character of Han Solo? Well, no, but since there was never much “mystery” to the character, anyway, who cares? Yes, we knew the generalities about a lot of these events, but screenwriters Lawrence and Jon Kasdan have crafted a tale that shows us the nitty-gritty of how he entered the criminal underworld of that far-far-away galaxy, how he met the other characters we associate with him, and how he came to own that funny-looking spaceship.  Of course, we know Lawrence Kasdan as the guy who wrote Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, so if he says his is how Han’s life went down, then by Golly, I’ll take his word for it.

Whatever its shortcomings may be (and we’ll get to those), this film does the one thing lots of fans have been clamoring about for some time now - it gets around to showing us that there’s more going on in the galaxy than just the damn Death Star being built/rebuilt.  Ron Howard shows us lots of new characters that flesh out our knowledge of the Star Wars universe, some only in passing, and I like the director’s choices in how he chose which to bring to the forefront and which to leave as window-dressing. We see Han enlisting in the Navy to escape Corellia, only to be kicked out and sent down to the infantry.  He deserts and falls in with a gang of thieves led by Woody Harrelson’s Tobias Beckett, who spends lots of time stressing how important it is that Han not trust anyone. Han also meets Chewbacca (of course), meets Lando (played by a scene-stealing Donald Glover) and begins his life as (as he puts it) an “outlaw.” Speeder chases and train robberies and bar fights abound, and no, I’m not getting it confused with some generic Western.

Okay, I can hear many of you saying it - Alden Ehrenreich doesn’t look exactly like Harrison Ford.  Again, so what? Ehrenreich does a fine job of conveying the fake-it-til-you-make-it swagger we have come to know and love from the character of Han Solo, and does it with the slightly larger quantity of boyish charm this particular story requires.  He’s a fine actor and does a great job with portraying this character at this stage in his life, something the near 80-year old Ford couldn’t possibly do (well, not without some of that Michael Douglas/Ant-Man magic, anyway). The entire cast is terrific, and that includes Emilia Clarke, who gives what I think is her best non-"Game of Thrones" performance yet as Han’s boyhood love, Qi’ra.

My only true complaint about the film is Bradford Young’s cinematography.  If my experience had only happened in one theater, I’d write off the problem to minimum-wage theater workers not taking more pride in their work, but I’ve seen the film twice, in two different theaters, and both showings were entirely too dark.  Footage I’ve seen in the promotional materials on television seem much brighter, however, so I’m not sure what’s going in in Lucasfilm’s color-correction process or what Disney’s marketing team is doing to brighten things up. Maybe the home video print(s) will be better, but we’ll have to wait a few months to see.  

Look, if you love Star Wars (as I do), you’ll be more inclined to truly love Solo.  As with any beloved property, there are those out there who will take pot-shots at it merely because “it ain’t what it used to be” (or some other similar snide assessment), but those people are very sad and empty and have no joy in their souls, and make themselves feel better by tearing down what brings happiness to others.  Of course, I’m not a psychotherapist, and I don’t even play one on TV, so my diagnosis may not be entirely accurate, but you get my drift. I personally really, really liked it, but I won’t go so far as to say I loved it. It was a well-made, fun adventure story, one that fits into the Star Wars mythos very well, and I don’t really feel that I should ask more of it that that.

"The Edge of Seventeen" makes Teen Angst hip again

Movie “coming-of-age stories” are one of those tropes that many film fans just can’t seem to evolve beyond.  I admit I thought I had, but then I saw The Edge of Seventeen, and I have to admit that it seems the place in my heart John Hughes’ movies so effectively touched so many times is still there inside me.  The best of these flicks are capable of transporting we old farts back to a time of life that many of us now view through rose-colored glasses.  High school was never easy, with those four mid-teenage years representing a cauldron of raging hormones, exploding insecurity and academic pressure.  Not only has that not changed, I’m sure it’s even harder now than it was when I endured it.  It’s a wonder that anyone survives them.

With a smart, perceptive script from first-time director Kelly Fremon Craig and a wonderful lead perfor-mance by Hailee Steinfeld, The Edge of Seventeen re-minds us of the good, the bad, and the ugly of this life-phase through which we all must pass.  The movie gives Steinfeld a chance to equal her brilliant turn from 2010's True Grit, and she most certainly succeeds, portraying 17-year old Nadine, an 11th-grader who, in typical Molly Ringwald-fashion, can't seem to connect with people her own age.  To add insult to injury, she has only one best friend named Krista (played by Haley Lu Richardson), who through a late-teen version of a Series of Unfortunate Events, ends up falling for Nadine’s popular star-jock brother Darian (Blake Jenner).  Feeling a sense of betrayal only a teenaged girl could feel, and getting no sympathy from her seemingly bipolar mother (Kyra Sedgwick), she ends up going to one her teachers (Woody Harrelson), whose apparent lack of empathy is all the more hilarious because of its subtlety.

Oh, sure, there are other Sixteen Candles-ish tropes here, such as the borderline nerdy guy who in smitten by our heroine, but Nadine is so wrapped up in her own problems and superficial lust for another dreamboat that she can’t completely see it. Nadine’s actually kind of a brat (yep, that feels true to the age, too), but Steinfeld’s charisma and the script’s humor somehow make her misdirected rage and blundering attempts at independence endearing.  It reminds us of how the brave leaps and big stumbles every teen makes can sting, as she tries (we tried) to figure out how to be herself (ourselves).

The biggest key to the film’s success is that Fremon Craig’s script and direction don’t depend on slapstick to propel the story.  It also helps that the direction is conservative, not drowning the screenplay in references and teenage lingo (I’m looking at you, Juno).  Her script doesn’t adhere to the clichés, but softens them and makes them a bit more real and believable.  There’s a comfort in the familiarity on which a coming-of-age story such as this thrives, but that comfort is totally dependent on our being made to care for the characters, and I never got the impression that any of these kids were complete characitures, even when the story sort of demanded that they be one.

The ad campaign for the film touts it as the next The Breakfast Club or Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and while those compari-sons certainly aren’t off base, I think any conver-sation about this movie should be more about Hailee Steinfeld and how marvelous she is in this role. Of course, the rest of the cast are also quite good (being the old fart I am, I had no clue Blake Jenner was anything other than a reality-show joke -- I was floored at how good he is in this film), but this film is fueled by the central performance.  As Nadine comes to grips with everyone else moving on, with the whole world not being about her, she moves on from being a little annoying to completely sympathetic. Steinfeld handles this transition wonderfully.

It’s a shame a film such as The Edge of Seventeen is slapped with an R-rating, the justification for this be-ing a few “F”-bombs and sexual innuendoes, most of which are seen in larger quantities in other far-less meaningful PG-13 teen comedies.  I would hope parents could (and would) see this film with their teenagers.  Maybe the old fogies could be re-minded how difficult this time in their children’s lives might be, and the teens might see that there is hope they’ll survive the Hell of Adolescence.

"Seven Psychopaths" might be two or three too many.

I recently wrote that bad reviews were much more fun to write than good ones, but sitting here wondering what to say about Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths is making me feel that while writing bad reviews may be fun, writing so-so reviews is pretty dang difficult.  Throwing out a few sentences into a blank MS Word document, looking at them, rearranging them several times, and hoping some sort of coherent train of thought manifests itself as a result is the beginning of the process that (sometimes) leads to something I’m not ashamed to read back to myself, and then allow you, Dear Reader, to see.  The few sentences that get thrown onto the screen seem to come a bit faster, and contain a bit more wit, however, when I find myself on either end of the disgust/praise spectrum than they do when I’m somewhere in the apathetic middle.  Watching Colin Farrell play a writer struggling to get farther than his title of Seven Psychopaths makes me glad I don’t have to resort to some of the ends to which he must go for inspiration.

Farrell plays Marty, a screenwriter who has fixated himself on a title, “Seven Psychopaths,” and now strains his brain to flesh out a narrative from those two words.  His environment presents obstacles, as his girlfriend is a nag, badgering him about getting started and making headway on the screenplay, and his best friend Billy (Sam Rockwell) is apparently a slacker/loser, making an existence out of stealing dogs and then returning them to grateful owners for the reward money.   Oh, and it goes without saying that Marty, being Irish, and a writer to boot, drinks to excess, to the point he can’t remember his girlfriend kicking him out of the house the night before he awakens on a sofa at Billy’s place. 

On the sofa beside him is Billy’s latest “hostage,” a Shih Tzu that happens to be owned by Charlie (Woody Harrelson), a gangster of some sort who loves this furry little turd beyond comprehension and sets out on a murderous crusade to find it, one that leads to Billy’s co-hort Hans (Christopher Walken), and then to Marty.  During all of this, Billy has provided Marty some story fodder in the form of pointing out a newspaper story about a current serial killer who targets mob figures, and has even taken it upon himself to find some research opportunities for Marty by placing a newspaper ad for psychopaths to come and be interviewed, without Marty’s approval and against his better judgment and survival instincts. 

The plot weaves and jumps through Billy, Hans and Marty’s escaping Charlie’s goons, the interviewing of one of the psychopath want-ad respondents, and the visualizing of their brainstorming sessions for the screenplay – ideas that range from Vietnamese villagers and hookers in Vegas hotel rooms, to a mixed-race couple on murdering-of-murderers spree through 1960s-Civil-Rights-era America, to a current-day mass nighttime shootout in a Los Angeles graveyard.  They flee to Joshua Tree National Park in the California desert, have some deep philosophical discussions, and eventually have a showdown with Charlie to determine who gets to keep the Shih Tzu.  You know, just a quiet, introspective character study of a film... 

So was the whole thing a figment of Marty’s imagination, some sort of writer’s mental process that led to the screenplay he’s shown completing at the movie’s end?  I leave that for you to determine, but there’s probably no right or wrong answer to that question.  The opening scene of the movie is definitely one of Marty working on his story, and the tag sequence that interrupts the final credits is almost certainly a dream sequence, too, so one must wonder just how much of what happens in between is imaginary as well. 

Anyway, Farrell is pretty good here, as he usually is.  It seems he realizes that he's the center of sanity in this story, and the nutjobs around him are the entertainment, so his struggle to maintain a grasp on his less-stable companions sort of mirrors the audience's trying to keep up with what's actually happening to them and what's their vivid imaginations running wild. Rockwell has shown us he can "act out" with the best of them in such fare as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the first Charlie's Angels flick (yes, I saw that - don't judge), and Walken is... well, he's Christopher Walken. Some people (although I'm not certain that I'm one of them) subscribe to the theory that Christopher Walken in anything can be entertaining, if nothing else than waiting to see if he'll demand more cowbell at any given moment.   

This movie was written and directed by Martin McDonagh, and I liked what I believe he was trying to do here, but the final product on screen seemed like he was trying a bit too hard, and I think parody/satire/alternate reality depends on an effortless-ness in order to succeed.  While not exactly the same genre, I enjoyed his In Bruges about four years ago a lot more than this.  Although I could sense his style in the characters and dialogue of Seven Psychopaths, I thought In Bruges was much funnier and don’t feel like it tried anywhere near as hard. 

I wouldn’t have minded paying for the tickets for this one, but fortunately, I didn’t have to (thank you, Regal Cinemas Crown Club rewards points!).  That said, if you’re a Colin Farrell fan, or even a Sam Rockwell fan, then you might find this enjoyable once it pops up on Cinemax a year from now (and this one definitely feels like Cinemax – not HBO…).  Maybe you’ll have an easier time of coming up with something witty to say about it afterwards than I did.

"The Thin Red Line..." Oh, I saw red, all right...

Working on cleaning off my DVR last night, I re-watched Terence Malick's The Thin Red Line.  I remember it being Oscar-bait on its initial release in 1998, but I didn't make it to the theater to see it.  Finally catching up to it on DVD a few years later, it really left a bad taste in my mouth.  However, never let it be said that I can't remain open to the possibility that I should re-evaluate something, so I decided to give it another chance and see if I'd missed something somehow.  No dice, folks - my opinion hasn't changed

Why must filmmakers of the last thirty-five years paint the fighting soldier, particularly the American fighting soldier, using a angst-filled, vile, butchering brush?  Did the home front experience of the Vietnam War so scar these men that now make movies about those who actually went over there and did the fighting?  The depictions of the armed conflicts of the last decade that “Hollywood” presents us demonstrates their attitudes haven’t changed, either.  The argument as to whether the Vietnam War or the War on Terror are Just wars is for another time and place, but in attempting to broaden that argument to cover all war in general, Malick has committed something akin to blasphemy in The Thin Red Line.  By choosing to move such metaphysical musings to the heads of the soldiers fighting the World War II battle for Guadalcanal in the Pacific, he has distorted history, insulted veterans and completely misrepresented the values and beliefs of the American GI’s who fought that crucial battle.

Malick doesn’t deserve all the blame, I suppose, as this film is based on James Jones’ somewhat autobiographical novel from the early 1960s, a time when all of the free-love, no-man-is-right-over-another philosophy was beginning to gel amongst the intelligentsia of the world’s youth.  The book may be fantastic, but I can’t say as I haven’t had the pleasure of reading it.  Whatever the quality of the source material, it seems that Malick has taken it and made a complete and utter mess of it.  Sure, this film was his celebrated return to filmmaking after a twenty-year absence, and it received a Best Picture Oscar nomination, most likely just due to the awe in which Academy voters hold Malick.  But this wasn’t worth the wait.

The plot (such as it is) follows four men, I think, as they struggle with finding meaning in the carnage of the Pacific War against the Japanese.  I say that I think it was four men because two of them, played by Jim Caviezel and Ben Chaplin, look so remarkably alike that at times I couldn’t tell them apart.  Hell, I challenge a viewer to learn their names without resorting to the Internet Movie DataBase.  One (Caviezel) plays the part of the Conscientious Objector, a chronic deserter who, after being picked up by the Army while living amongst island natives, is assigned to stretcher-bearer duty at the film’s outset.  By the end of the film, Malick shows the character’s selfishness to be misplaced, but for certainly less-than-patriotic reasons.  Another (Chaplin) is the one who was taken away from his young bride, and lives only to return to her.  Again, Malick shows us the foolishness of such devotion by the film’s end.

The other two are thankfully a bit more discernible from one another.  Sean Penn is a company sergeant who makes it his mission to show Caviezel’s character the error of his ways, but by film’s end, he finds more sympathy with the deserter than he would’ve imagined possible.  Lastly is the battalion colonel (Nick Nolte), who drives his men relentlessly to take a well-defended Japanese position, one that his underlings believe impossible to take.  While Malick shows the Colonel to be right, we’re to understand that it is more for the colonel’s fear of missing out on his share of military glory than for the higher cause of victory, because he flat-out tells his subordinates so!  How ridiculous a notion.

Other characters drift in and out of our vision, played by A-list stars like Woody Harrelson and John Travolta and John Savage, mumbling about vines consuming trees and soldiers being like children to their Captain-fathers, none of whom ever make any mark with us save as examples of the Hell of War.  Their voice-overs almost overlap, allowing us to eavesdrop on their confusion, their fear and their cowardice, but the weight of their musings is all but lost because it’s all but impossible to determine just which one of them is speaking at any given moment.

The film is so without a logical structure that I suppose it’s possible Malick himself didn’t know exactly what he wanted to say.  I understand that his original cut of the film clocked in at something like five hours, which Fox simply would not allow, so hacking out two hours of story may account for some of the incompleteness I felt from the dangling plotlines and underdeveloped characters (I think poor Adrien Brody has but one spoken line, despite his face popping up in it throughout the final two-thirds of the film - shoot, even the film's title is never explained).  He worked on this material so long that he might have simply drifted away from the novel’s original intent.  I doubt this, though.  Say what you want about the politics of filmmakers, their skill is rarely debatable, and filmmakers of Malick’s caliber put on the screen exactly what they intend.  It’s just so puzzling and disappointing that what he intended here was such a slap in the face to so noble a struggle.

The imagery of this movie is breathtaking.  Don’t let it be said that I didn’t acknowledge that.  Malick has not lost his visual touch during his extended vacation, but he has obviously not advanced beyond his mid-70s thinking.  Whatever things the Vietnam War may have been, World War II was almost none of them.  That war was a just war, and the soldiers fighting it knew it.  American men were lining up in droves to volunteer to go and crush an evil power that had attacked us and swore to destroy us, and only a microscopic few had any problems with self-doubt or introspection about “why nature must contend with itself” or finding the “evil inherent in all men” that the wretched souls in this film have.  Of course, I’m aware of the post-traumatic problems that some of the combatants suffered in the post-war years, but I shudder to think of what my veteran grandfather, God rest his soul, who froze his butt off during the Battle of the Bulge and marched across Remagen Bridge and into the German heartland, would’ve said about this bunch of pansies.