This Week in (Virtual) Tickets: 13 July 2020 - 9 August 2020

This is what you might call an extremely lockdown-inspired chunk of movie-watching, from "I can do this big project" to "I don't want to do anything" to virtual theater streaming to stuff you've always meant to get around to. It's a roller coaster, sort of.









It kind of starts off with the sort of online shopping spree one gets vulnerable to when you're spending so much time inside and on your computer, as I took advantage of a sale to pick up not just the newly released The Rise of Skywalker but most of the movies that came before on 4K. I'd mostly planned to just do the Rise review I'd punted back in December, but instead decided to watch the whole Star Wars saga, one per night. It not only holds up as a whole well enough to not be hurt by a disappointing finale, to the point where I'd like more right now.

In the middle of that, I took a couple of cinematic trips to Hong Kong for a double feature: The Inspector Wears Skirts was the back end of a double feature with The Empire Strikes Back on night #2, and it turned out to be not great. I found myself fairly fond of Denise Ho: Becoming the Song on night #6, though - it's a pretty good starter for folks who would like to know what's going on with the protests there.

I took a night off between the main saga and the "extra" movies, both of which were part of two-movie days with stuff that was playing in the local virtual theaters. Amulet, sad to say, was a pretty disappointing horror movie, the sort where you can see the good pieces but where the whole just doesn't come together. The next night's, Relativity, was one that grew on me as I wrote about it.

Then, after that, it was a pretty sluggish week as I tried to write up the Star Wars stuff and watch baseball and get stuff done for work. There's only so much baseball to watch, but the Red Sox have decided to start the games later, which makes no sense because fewer people are trying to get to the park or even home from work to watch it, and stink and play poorly and not even leave a lot of time for a movie afterward. Bleh.

By the time I was ready to go again, I was looking for 90-minute movies, which led to two early ones by Ann Hui, Zodiac Killers and The Story of Woo Viet. It's an interesting thing to look back after only having seen some of her later, more acclaimed and less genre-infused works - I came in with a lot of different expectations that both were and weren't met.

After that, there was some more time to pull some discs off the shelf - Blood Simple, Legend of the Wolf, and Hopscotch to start the week, and then Memoirs of an Invisible Man at the end. You're never going to believe this, but the two that I got as part of Criterion Collection sales were better than the ones which I bought because they were movies from guys I usually like that maybe aren't big deals like they're classics. Crazy, right? Who'd've thought?

Next one of these will probably be in another month, since I've started watching Fantasia screeners and part of covering them as press is agreeing to embargos, which specifically includes when they can go on one's Letterboxd page. Congrats, ya crazy kiwis, you've built a platform that's a big enough deal for festivals and publicity people to make rules that mention you specifically!

Ba Wong Fa (The Inspector Wears Skirts)

* * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

They made four of these things, for some reason, shedding characters as they went until only two of the original ensemble cast were left a mere four years later. It must have been a hit, and I suppose that if you come at it looking for a light girl-power take on Police Academy, it does that well enough for its period, and it's partially my fault for expecting more action and sharper wit both times I saw it.

It's tough for the film to not be a let-down after the extremely fun action piece that opens it, with Cynthia Rothrock showing up as a guest star to fight alongside Sibelle Hu, but the film doesn't help itself in a lot of ways: That bit puts the instructor at the center, but she's pushed to the side through the rest of the film, and while the students are fun, there's maybe too many of them with only the slightest story connecting them. The filmmakers position Sandra Ng as "the stocky one", which she's not, really, although she is the one who is putting the most effort into being funny (quote-oddly-unquote, the guy she's paired with, who actually does look sort of heavy, never becomes the butt of jokes for it). It doesn't always work, and maybe wouldn't until filmmakers started putting her into films where everybody was trying as hard. The brief action bits before a messy finale are so formal that they never get to be fun.

The lesson here, I guess, is not to buy movies and have them shipped from the other side of the planet without checking your own blog. I apparently didn't like this much 16 years ago, and while some of that was walking home disappointed after a midnight show, a fair amount wasn't.

What I thought back in 2004

Blood Simple

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

When I watched the copy of Blood Simple that I got from the latest B&N Criterion sale, I wasn't sure whether I'd seen it before or not, and afterwards I still wasn't sure - it seemed familiar in a general sense, but not in any particular scene. That's not to say it felt generic, just that it's a well-oiled machine of a movie; the Coens made a heck of a modern noir without getting winky or meta and if that means it doesn't have quite the easy hook to file individual bits away that the more obviously self-aware thrillers that they and others would make, it's fine. The movie just works.

That simple, machine-like nature is a big part of why it sucks the audience in; there's a remorseless order to how every step just a little further outside the usual bounds leads to the next, and even as each man further compromises himself, they're not really ready to handle the person who has gone a step further (Frances McDormand's Abby isn't an innocent damsel, but she mostly avoids the sort of descent the men undergo). It's a small enough world that it can handle a few coincidences and near-misses, along with a finale that emphasizes how small steps can explode into something that destroys the whole circle in highly visible fashion.

It's never just low-key and heads-down, though. Dan Hedaya and M. Emmet Walsh are quite enjoyably scummy men, with John Getz the sort of handsome and earnest counterpart that maybe wouldn't take all that much to sink to the others' level. I'm a bit curious about how the Coens (making their first feature) managed to hook up with Barry Sonnenfeld (shooting his first feature); it's a great pairing, especially since the Coens are still coming from the same place as Sam Raimi in how they stage action. You don't necessarily expect to see noteworthy folks on the same project that early, but they're a great match.

It's entirely possible that, the next time a local theater has a Coen Brothers or modern noir series, I'll see "Blood Simple" on the calendar, not be sure whether I've seen it before, and have more or less the same experience I did this time, only with an audience and a bigger screen. It's not yet as idiosyncratic as the Coens would later become famous for, but it's awfully effective genre work.

Chin long chuen suet (Legend of the Wolf)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Hong Kong Blu-ray)

How old is Donnie Yen's character supposed to be in the "present day" segments of Legend of the Wolf? 80-ish? He doesn't look elderly, and rooting him specifically in the mid/late 1990s seems like an odd choice, given how timeless the flashback material that makes up the bulk of the story is. There's fun bits there, to be sure, from the perfectly blue and sleazy look of the city to how the guy looking for "Wolf" is doing so via perfectly realized 1997 computer bullshit, but what happens "now" is never as important as "then" and the winking acknowledgment that the story being flashed back to is maybe embellished doesn't really gain the movie anything.

Of course, one can kind of understand the need; Donnie Yen was a great screen fighter but not yet much of an actor, and the script he and his collaborators come up with makes his character a blank slate. It doesn't make a lot of sense or give the audience a lot of reason to invest in him or hypothetically wonder how he became the mysterious fixer in the 1990s, but his performance doesn't actually clank here, so... fine? It's a set-up that acknowledges Yen's limits and gives him a little chance to get better.

That all that does, eventually, is get the movie to a couple of highly impressive fight scenes, including a creative sort of "running melee" that I really liked: It's one of the few times I can remember a foot chase becoming a fight scene without regularly stopping to plant, putter around a "ring", and then start back up again. Arguably its most memorable bit of bonkers action plays into this, a ridiculous and likely impossible redirection of a knife that keeps the action literally moving.

Eventually, Yen would find the right sort of screen personae and collaborators to actually be a quality leading man between the punching and kicking. Legend of the Wolf doesn't have him there yet, but the action is enough fun to be worth a watch on its own.

Hopscotch

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 5 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

Has anybody, aside from maybe Peter Falk, benefited more from getting older and having a few wrinkles than Walter Matthau? He was a few years from playing old here - he's more the sort of rumpled and weathered middle-age that later fitness trends would make less visible - but he's got a wry wit that comes from experience that only got better with age.

Hopscotch is all leaning into that, with Matthau playing a senior spy being put out to pasture because he is all too well-aware of how much better he knows his job than the people above him, and while he's got a chance at a soft landing (Glenda Jackson as a former lover who has married a wealthy man and been widowed but not lost any interest in Matthau's Miles Kendig), he can't stop being a spy. It's who he is. Even as he decides to write his memoirs and use their publication to taunt his former masters, he's almost certainly getting more of a kick out of finding a new use for his old skills than causing actual harm.

That's a large part of what makes it so much fun; aside from it being a good 100 minutes of Matthau walking about with a twinkle in his eye, with only Ned Beatty's blustering blunt instrument really opposing him actively (Sam Waterston and Herbert Lom are detached, appreciative pursuers), it's generally light. The secrets in Kendig's book are clearly more embarrassing than dangerous, and his level of pettiness stays more or less exactly where it should. It's an impressive sort of balance throughout, a breezy comedy that never loses sight of both how unproductive and wasteful the Cold War tended to be but also how dangerous the folks who wanted it to to be ruthlessly fought were. It's obviously a product of its time, but the human beings involved are real and likable enough for it to still work 40 years later.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 9 August 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)

Memoirs of an Invisible Man feels like it was an entertaining book whose adaptation got run through too many drafts by too many screenwriters until any sort of satire that might have made studio executives uncomfortable was gone, along with anything they figured the punters wouldn't understand, and what is left is a shell of a movie, a standard story of an ordinary man on the run from an ordinary CIA killer. It looks especially bad when put up against 2020's version of The Invisible Man, which has a pointed idea of what to use invisibility for compared to the half-hearted take on conformity this movie tries to make into a theme.

There is still some fun to be had; Daryl Hannah is in it, and even if she's got kind of a nothing character, she's charming enough to drag Chevy Chase's milquetoast up a notch or two in likability when they play off each other. It never hurts to have Michael McKean and Stephen Tobolowsky around, and while Sam Neill is given a pretty standard-issue villain, it's not hard to spot the moments when he finds something he can work with. He gets to run with one of the shockingly few bits of invisible-man physical comedy as he mimes getting dragged around an office with a gun to his head, and I feel like few people do a much better switch between nastiness and smiling insincerity when called upon. Director John Carpenter would work with him again in his next feature, In the Mouth of Madness, to much better effect, suggesting that none of the talented people here were ever on the same page.

Truth be told, it seems like a strict paycheck job for Carpenter - consider how viciously his previous movie, They Live, went after capitalism and complacency compared to how this one never really has an alternate route for its stock-trading main character - but he still does a solid, professional job as director, though he can't get more out of the script than was put in. He and the folks at Industrial Lights and Magic really seem to get a kick out of creating the various invisibility effects, squeezing the most they can out of the relatively new CGI technology and also putting together some impressive matte painting work. For all the other faults, "Memoirs" has more than a few moments when, even 28 years later, someone might sit up a little straighter and say something is a really cool special effect a few times; it hits the sweet spot where you can see the level of effort and the creativity that led to a striking image as opposed to pure grinding (either virtually or in the real world).

Movies where the best thing is the cutting-edge special effects don't always age well, and this one's no exception. It's still John Carpenter, a good cast, and some striking visuals, and that's worth watching once.

The Star Wars Saga

Back in December, I kind of punted reviewing The Rise of Skywalker, figuring that I'd see it on the big screen twice like I had every other new Star Wars movie in the Disney era, but never got around to it. So I figured I'd wait until it was on disc, but by then it was a pandemic and Amazon was playing its now-familiar game with Disney pre-orders and pricing the 4K versions of the prior movies that came out at full retail. I eventually caved when they had a 3-for-1 sale that included the 4K discs, although I didn't quite update everything.

At that point, seeing them all lined up on a shelf made me want to do a re-watch and I decided to do it in the "flashback" order Drew McWeeny described on Ain't It Cool way back when they were new - start with Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, then jump to the prequel trilogy in the wake of "I am your father", before seeing the fallout in Return of the Jedi. Now it makes sense to follow them up with the sequel trilogy, and while I was originally going to leave the "Star Wars Stories" out, I figured it would be fun to revisit them at the end, reaching back to Solo in the wake of how Han plays into the sequel trilogy, and finishing on Rogue One, so that we wind up coming full circle. If I had time, I might have tried to fit The Mandalorian in between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, just to give a sense of a generation passing. Hopefully there will be good spots for the Obi-Wan (and rumored Lando) series in the future, although it's hard to imagine doing this sort of marathon again if there's not another pandemic. Every time I see people doing something like this - or even crazier, like rewatching a multi-season TV series - I wonder where they find the time, what with all the new material and reissues that are coming out all the time.

That said, it's something that's particularly interesting with this franchise because it gives you a couple chances to really see how things change both within an era and between them, even with the Special Edition coat atop the original versions. There has been so much talk of how Star Wars changed cinema over the past four decades that one can overlook that it is not so far from Silent Running (or THX-1138) as all that; it's just George Lucas squeezing as much out of the state of the art as he can and aiming at the mainstream rather than treating fantasy as a niche. You can see him pushing two generations' technology past their old limits in both the original and prequel series, too, inventing something new each time to get his ideas onto the screen. For the sequels, it often seems like there's not a lot of places new technology is needed, and it's just Disney/Lucasfilm pouring massive amounts of competence into the projects. There's something to be said for just being able to do stuff rather than having to innovate, especially for a mature franchise, but that means that there's only half as much chance to create awe and surprise in the new films, and only Rian Johnson has really managed it.

Apparently it will be a while before we can add more features to this sort of marathon (2023 at the earliest), although plenty of TV in the meantime. That's never not going to be weird for me, but truth be told, I wasn't expecting the rest - the relentless production of slick movies that don't have anything sticking out as bad should have kept it rolling a little more, even with the pandemic. I still wonder if pushing Solo to December 2018 would have kept the belt moving rather than the current situation where the movies seem up in the air.

I wish they were still doing "Star Wars every Christmas", though - just a couple days after finishing this, I found myself wanting to watch another Star Wars movie. I'm not going to dig around to find the more obscure stuff, but it suggests that I'll be up for more digs through various box sets and the like as the stay-at-home situation drags on, considering that I've usually got some trepidation about that.

Star Wars

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 15 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

I wasn't quite old enough to see Star Wars in theaters when it first played - I would have been three and a half with no older siblings and I don't think it was really my parents' thing - so I'm just old enough that it didn't blow my mind as opposed to being a regular (if not every-week) part of what movies were. It also means that I never saw a lot of the science fiction that came before it, so it took me until now to really see how the look of it is not that far from other bits of 1970s sci-fi. There's a ton of kitbashing in the miniature work, cleverly repurposed items as props, a run-down aesthetic, plus tight quarters indoors and deserts outside. The 4K disc makes it more clear, with all that detail right in front of me, and finally getting to see the good sci-fi from the 1970s on the big screen rather than "so bad it's good" on DVD-at-best-quality video.

That aside, the movie works like few others do; Lucas and his team hit on a great combination of world-building, action, and character work that grounds the rest, and seldom falter despite it not really being done at scale that often before. It's fun in a way that works for kids and doesn't lose so much luster when seen through more mature eyes even if it doesn't quite reveal so many new depths as it maybe would like to. It's got the big themes if not the pointed ones that Lucas occasionally describes or which are more clear in the prequels.

One thing that strikes me more on this watch - and I don't know whether it's being older or the higher-resolution medium making the differences in age easier to see - but it's striking how much more clearly Luke and Leia scan as teenagers despite not being in the sort of situations that usually signify such than they did before. Maybe that's a side effect of having seen them as grown-up as a kid, or seeing young people more clearly getting thrown into terrible situations in the present and it seeming to fit more. It changes things up to see that clearly, and gives it an urgency and desperation that it didn't always have before.

What I said when I saw it with the Boston Pops last year

The Empire Strikes Back

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 16 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

If Star Wars surprises in how much it still kind of looks like a 1970s sci-fi movie underneath Lucas's polish (and a later coat of mid-1990s CGI), Empire is the movie that still feels like it belongs to that era and the ones that came before, with stop-motion (and go-motion) animation, and casual darkness that isn't just used as an exclamation point. In a lot of ways, Star Wars changed the game, but Empire shows that what came before still had some influence.

It's a great refinement of its predecessor, too: The writing team of Leigh Brackett & Lawrence Kasdan takes the broad strokes that George Lucas has always been good at and makes everyone a bit sharper without losing their original voice, with the actors taking great advantage, and then director Irvin Kershner and company tie it together exceptionally well. They're filling in the corners a little better without going too nuts, and this is almost certainly the most stylishly-shot film in the series until The Last Jedi. Its occasional darkness and hellish color schemes are probably a large part of why it was mostly left alone for the Special Editions - the digital effects guys weren't quite so good at matching a specific style then, as one can see from the CGI shots of Cloud City that don't quite feel as tactile as the obvious models. The 4K disc really brings the way Kershner and his crew didn't neglect a bit of this movie out.

It's a bummer that the Boston Pops screening of this film scheduled for the spring was cancelled, although I'm kind of glad that my first time seeing this since TLJ wasn't there - it rhymes with that so well that I'm glad I had some time to notice the way Johnson did similar things without seeming to imitate this movie when I might have wanted to concentrate on the score.

The Phantom Menace

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 17 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

Rewatching this in "flashback order" after Empire does it no favors; you're both following one of the most stylishly tactile of the films with one of the most weightlessly rendered and one of the most mature with one consciously designed to appeal to the younger end of its audience with the idea of them maturing until they're ready for Episode III six years later, and it's a heck of a downshift. That's before you get to the ill-considered caricatures used for a number of characters (probably the most generous reading); I wondered a bit before hitting play how this might work if Disney Special Editioned the stereotypes down to quarter-strength, but there's a lot of it.

And, besides, it's not like what's around it is any less rough. There's some weak acting (Jake Lloyd was really not up for this), stretching to cover all the set-up Lucas wanted to do, and more effects work than even ILM working at cost can manage at the time, though it was more than anyone else had done. Nothing can take the thrill away from seeing new Star Wars for the first time in years come 1999, even if Lucas's plan to focus on the next generation rather than be more obviously dark and adult for the kids who loved this the first time around was a mixed bag.

And there is still quite a lot to like about it. Much of the cast is pretty nifty, from the expected folks like Liam Neeson, Frank Oz, and Sam Jackson to how Natalie Portman really grabs how Padme is a queen but also a teen prodigy and runs with it, catching how she's smart and mature but also curious and very much aware of how out of her depth she is at times. She's able to make the character hit just the right note that we can forgive her for being played even though it's got to be made kind of obvious to fit into the movie. And, yes, Ian McDiarmid is great at building his two halves of the movie so that they work separately but come seamlessly together. To what extent Lucas figured on doing this when casting him 16 years earlier, I have no idea, but it worked out (or maybe just having some version of the whole thing in your head at the start gives you more to work with later).

Attack of the Clones

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

It's a shame that so much of what is done with Anakin and Padmé clangs here, because the Obi-Wan side of the movie is really my thing, far more than I remember it being. It's just a really fun mystery/adventure which pushes up the level of intrigue nicely, with some of the most enjoyable pulp sci-fi imagery of the whole saga, the sort that highlights how George Lucas used the prequels to show new things even as many of the other movies played the hits.

That Anakin side is kind of a mess, half Lucas realizing that he's got a lot of work to do to get the blank slate from Episode I to where he must inevitably end up and sometimes seeming to zero in on how, aside from how he's being manipulated, Anakin is kind of a familiar sort of too-cocky guy, kind of a parallel with Han & Leia in "Empire", except that Padmé seems more genuinely uncomfortable (saying as much in so many words), but still falling for him. Which happens, although it's the sort of attraction that doesn't play so well twenty years later, and it also has the first of the saga's women just keeling over dead once they're not of any use to the story.

You can really start to see what Lucas is doing here, though, and the stuff he nails, he nails well: The sudden brutality and ruthlessness of the action in the final act shows a kind of horror at the militarism that can often just serve as background noise in this genre, which makes the callous, murderous ambition of Sidious hit all the harder. For all the film's faults - and I suspect that of the series, none show both George Lucas's strengths and weaknesses as well as this one - it gets the audience to feel Yoda's despair at the end, wanting what the Jedi are supposed to be but realizing that it ultimately breaks down.

Revenge of the Sith

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

Man, this is almost great in so many ways. Lucas really should have found something for Natalie Portman to do throughout most of the movie or tweaked a few bits - imagine if Anakin's first force choke had caused an aneurysm rather than someone dying of a broken heart and how that would add to the operatic finale, for instance. There are a lot of little things like that, none that really crush the film, but which at the time made it pretty easy to look at how it wasn't quite like the Star Wars we remembered (even as bits try and force their way to it) and just dismiss the prequel trilogy.

Still, 15 years on, it's pretty clear George Lucas had his finger on something, enough that I wonder if, after the rough start with Episode I, seeing where the country went after 9/11 gave him a certain sort of focus. This is an angry movie, and a tragic one, and I don't know that I fully saw the anger behind the Star Wars mythology coming full circle back then. Watching it now, it's clear, but I can also see where J.J. Abrams saw an opening for where he wound up going with Rise of Skywalker, and I think it's telling that he chose the mythology rather than the metaphor.

I kind of wish that Disney had dug out the 3D conversions that were done for the prequels rather than issuing them on 4K discs - the early-aughts digital capture doesn't have the same sort of detail and richness that the film-originated films do, but the action scenes and world-building feel like they would really pop in 3D, almost like they were being made with an eye toward that.

What I said way back in 2005

Return of the Jedi

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

I suspect that I like Return of the Jedi at least a little more now than I did before the prequels; they make the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker more explicit and less cobbled-together. It's an insert that makes this movie feel more like the culmination of a continuing story rather than something that shows how it was made up as it went along, what with the sudden "I've always known" and entire first act spent reversing the last film's cliffhanger. It's not the case that it took 20 years and a decade of retcons to feel complete, but it benefits from having those later bits inserted more than its predecessors.

It's still a satisfying film on its own and finale for those of us that didn't know there would be more on top of that. George Lucas and his collaborators have finished building the modern blockbuster here, where the previous entries were in large part polishing and evolving the previous era's style, but now you've got serial structure, effects that may not be seamless but don't look like something made separately. It's a fun adventure movie that smartly doesn't get too heavy as it wraps up a trilogy. Industrial Light and Magic builds some big action without ever going overboard, and John Williams rises to the occasion with a great score.

The Force Awakens

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 21 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)

I hadn't necessarily planned to upgrade this one because buying three copies within five years is a lot even for a guy who likes physical media as much as I do, but for all that this probably has the 3D shot I like more than any other, it's a clear step down visually from the 4K discs of the rest. I guess I'm just going to have to resolve myself to buying multiple copies for as long as they're making 3D discs.

Picture quality aside, watching this for the first time in a couple years actually has it improving a bit for me, in that the back half which I often dismissed as copying the original trilogy too closely works better than I'd thought. There's never a hard shift, really, and while Poe's sudden, unexplained return kind of foreshadows the mess that J.J. Abrams would make a couple years later as he desperately tries to give everyone what they want, you can see what he's seeding for later a little better, and fitting together counts for a fair amount. Everything that works in this movie works all the way through. And some bits - like Hux and Kylo communicating with Snoke in what is clearly a ruined, empty legislative chamber of some kind - works even better, demonstrating just how desperately the people involved are trying to concentrate power.

One thing that really stands out watching this so soon after the original trilogy is that, much as I complained at the time that Abrams mostly copied the visuals rather than really adding anything new, he and his team did establish a somewhat different aesthetic: It's still generally X-Wings, TIE fighters, and a lot of designs from the original trilogy, but there's a brushed-metal look to them that speaks to a less explicitly kid-targeted set of movies. Nothing looks kit-bashed anymore, even the Star Destroyers; between how effects have improved over the past decade and the amount of money Disney is willing to throw at the films, they seem to be building things full-size and then able to use the CGI to capture the full detail. There's no compromise related to how much can be done with either models or CGI, something I didn't much notice when seeing The Force Awakens alongside other blockbusters from the mid-teens but which sticks out more when seen after Revenge of the Sith and Return of the Jedi.

Full review from 2015

The Last Jedi

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

Revisiting this one a couple years later, it is still easily the best film of the series since the original, or maybe since The Empire Strikes Back, since one can see how much its outline owes to that movie watching them so close together, and even if I don't necessarily expect everyone to agree with this, I'm still shocked at the level of vitriol it received. Did folks really look at the end of The Force Awakens and think "Luke has been training a secret Jedi army or is otherwise eager to get back into the fight" was how this was going to go? Heck, watching it again, I'm even more ready to defend the Canto Bight sequence - it's not nearly as long as people say, and when you put it next to The Force Awakens, it's pretty crucial for getting Finn from being the guy who is reflexively bullshitting people about his motivations to being someone whose beliefs align with the Resistance.

The second time I saw it in 2017, I spent a lot more time talking about the new theater than the film in large part because I gushed so thoroughly the first time and didn't have a whole lot to say, and I find myself in the same situation here, even if it is right up there with the ones I love the most. I've got a couple of nits that I maybe didn't have before - for as much as Johnson recognized that most of the First Order characters don't have much to them and was ruthless in exploiting that, either by making Hux mostly comic relief and recognizing that Phasma needed to be tossed aside once Finn wasn't afraid of her, he really boxed whoever was going to follow him in, although that was made worse by Abrams and company making a lot of other dumb mistakes. But I found things I liked a bit more, too, like how Snoke's throne room is kind of a ridiculous bit of pretension and the big fight shreds that. Abrams will kind of run with that bit, at least, although more as mythology than something grounded.

What I thought back in 2017

The Rise of Skywalker

* * (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

I said back during this film's theatrical release that it was probably going to take me a second viewing to decide whether this movie is genuinely bad, with most of what I enjoyed being a Pavlovian reaction to John Williams's score, or just a decent movie that is nevertheless a massive letdown because it follows (and in some ways undermines) the series's best entry in 40 years. It says something that I'm willing to consider that second viewing - it's Star Wars, and even the messiest and most flawed movies in the franchise have had something to impress - but probably something else that I didn't get around to it while it was still in theaters and instead waited until the home video release was on sale for a reduced price. For a movie that should have been a triumphant finale along the lines of what Disney's Marvel office achieved with Avengers: Endgame earlier in the year, it winds up forgettable, and lucky to be so, because it's filled with decisions worth forgetting.

Since the events of The Last Jedi, a message from Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) has been broadcast across the galaxy, despite his winding up pretty unequivocally dead at the end of Return of the Jedi. As a result, both Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), who has seized control of the tyrannical First Order, and the Resistance fighters led by Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) scramble to follow a trail to Sith planet Exegol. Ren has a massive head start, while the team of Rey (Daisy Ridley), Poe (Oscar Isaac), Finn (John Boyega), Chewbacca (Joonas Tuotamo), C-3PO (Anthony Daniels) and BB-8 must follow a trail hinted at by a series of lost artifacts.

It's a structure that winds up chopping the film up into a number of distinct sections, at least for the heroes, and that's okay, but it also leads to each section feeling lightweight, especially once the moment in one that was supposed to elicit a bit of strong emotion is undone in the next. It's a structure that gets more obviously rickety as the film goes on and the whole premise becomes even more far-fetched even by the genre's own standards, but which makes things feel less exciting and impactful even as the stakes get higher and the ticking clock counts down. As has often been the case over the course of his career, co-writer/director J.J. Abrams often seems to know what a great movie moment looks like but isn't quite so adept at connecting that big moment to smaller ones on either side that support it.

He has, admittedly, been given a tremendously difficult task - not just crafting a film that can serve as a suitable finale to a trilogy, but to a trilogy of trilogies, but being asked to step in when another filmmaker was dismissed from the project, giving him a year less time than is typical for this type of movie, while also dealing with death of an actor who was going to have a major role and an extremely polarized reaction to the previous entry. Some of the compromises made are primarily awkward, like how every attempt to build something coherent out of what little unused footage of Carrie Fisher from previous movies does little but demonstrate that they probably would have been better off just saying she was busy on another front. Sometimes he and his co-writers bend over backwards to have the same situation lead to a different outcome as The Last Jedi; sometimes they don't even bother. These filmmakers get that "fail the first time, succeed the second" gets a cheer, but don't do much to earn it.

Instead, they undercut the broader themes Rian Johnson made a huge part of The Last Jedi that moved the franchise away from chosen ones and lineages, and for those who were impressed by Johnson's take on the series, it feels a bit like rolling back changes that made the franchise feel more modern. Instead, Abrams goes hard on legacy and something called a "Force Dyad" which, in terms of reducing the spiritual and philosophical underpinnings of The Force to nuts and bolts, is right down there with "midichlorians". He even undermines his own good work from The Force Awakens, a movie built around an indoctrinated Stormtrooper listening to his conscience and the child of heroes choosing evil, by reducing both choices to supernatural influence. The prequels had their own issues, but Anakin's fall was his own.

If rough casting choices were what hurt the prequels the most, that's certainly not a problem with the sequel trilogy; the cast Abrams and company assembled for The Force Awakens is still strong and charming and completely committed to their parts even if the material isn't nearly as good. There are a number of new additions that are also pretty good, even if they are by and large redundant. The way they bounce off each other is generally fun to watch. By this movie, the audience is as comfortable with them as with John Williams's score, and nobody is slacking off or otherwise doing anything to sacrifice that trust.

Similarly, the film is slickly-produced enough to go down fairly easy. A ton of resources are thrown at Industrial Light & Magic, the various other effects houses, and I wouldn't be surprised if the producers hired the absolute best pre-visualization crews in the business. It's a terrific looking movie with a lot of creative and stylish action, and while the only intermittently has enough heft to it to truly delight, it's never short on spectacle. Even in an era when new blockbusters come out every week, Star Wars still manages to make an argument for being the gold standard.

Disney paid too much for Lucasfilm to let one bad movie sink the franchise for good, and over the past few years, they've shown great willingness to spend a bunch of money and hire enough good people to prevent the sort of unwatchable debacle that damages the investment. The Rise of Skywalker is a bad movie, but it's one a viewer can get through without it tainting the rest of the series, even as the conclusion.

Also at eFilmCritic

Solo: A Star Wars Story

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 4K Blu-ray)

After all the chaos that Solo went through over the course of production, leading to a movie that stumbled hard enough at the box office to make Disney pause the theatrical franchise so that they could spend a couple years figuring out just what to to with it after the end of the Skywalker saga, it's kind of funny that this is the movie that threw Disney for a loop, because of just how conventional it winds up being. It is, as I said at the time, probably the most fan-servicing movie of the franchise, but it's also the one that most feels like it could have been the result of taking a non-franchise script and putting a coat of paint on it.

That's no bad thing, though; if what the original directors were planning was (as has been speculated) a self-aware riff on unnecessary origin stories, that might have been a step too far for the franchise, the sort of thing I'm already leery of when I see jokey appearances by Darth Vader and Stormtroopers at sporting events. As with The Rise of Skywalker, Solo makes it pretty clear that Disney will throw not just enough ability to get the job done and move on at a foundering Star Wars product, but an arguable excess of competent craftsmanship.. It works here; Solo is a fun movie that looks pretty great on its 4K HDR disc; I'm curious how many people who had issues with less-than-great projection will find it in their own living rooms where they can turn the brightness up or where they've just got more raw resolution than 2K theatrical projectors. It's a good movie that's maybe not what it could have been had Lucasfilm either stuck with Lord & Miller or hired Ron Howard to play the Kasdans' script straight to start with, and might have done better if released in the fall with enough time for talk of it being a troubled production to die down, but it still works pretty darn well.

What I thought in 2018

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 July 2020 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, 3D Blu-ray)

I'm mildly surprised that I didn't write about this upon its release; it appears to have fallen through some pretty tight cracks between eFilmCritic, this blog, and Letterboxd. In this case, that may be for the best; I wasn't exactly down with it being so different in tone than other Star Wars yet, I would have given the way that some of the most striking moments from the previews didn't make the film a little more emphasis than was probably merited (review the movie you've got, not the one you wanted), and a couple other issues.

On second view, though, it turns out to be a really electrifying look at what Disney could be doing with the "Star Wars Story" movies, from the first sharp chord of Michael Giacchino's soundtrack to the ground-down amorality of everyone involved, which is a different sort of compromise than the smugglers and mercs we've seen before. It takes a turn toward being more intense when even the more intense movies in the Skywalker Saga would be fun, and it's impressive that director Gareth Edwards (and Tony Gilroy on the reshoots) never wavers on that different tone.

Part of what makes it so memorable is how this is the film which most pointedly brings the galaxy's civil wars home to its people; most of the time it's attacks on isolated bases, outer space, or at such scale that there never seem to be ordinary people around. This one reminds me of footage from relatively current middle-eastern conflicts, and not just because Jedha is a desert environment and that's where a lot of contemporary combat footage comes from - it's how Scarif in comparison looks like one of those absurd cities on the Arabian Peninsula like Dubai or Doha, gleaming metal towers that seem more like a statement than something sustainable.

I was surprised at just how badly the digital Peter Cushing has aged, though - I recall it being fairly convincing in 2016, on an Imax-sized larger screen, but looked awful plastic-y in my living room. It's a different sort of misfire now than it seemed to be then - where before I just wanted more room for Ben Mendelsohn to be the film's primary villain, now I'm more intrigued at how Mendelsohn' Krennic chafes at Tarkin taking over his project, and the friction is something robo-Tarkin can't contribute to. It's a more extreme version of how none of the cast are really as vibrant as they perhaps could be, with the exceptions tending to be momentary rather than any one sticking out.

There's also not nearly enough of Donnie Yen beating the crap out of Stormtroopers with a stick, and given that this was one of my main reasons to be excited for the movie, I probably wouldn't have been fair to it on that count either.

This Week in Tickets: 16 December 2019 - 22 December 2019

All that blank space? Totally going out to get presents for others, not just making my way through the new season of The Expanse at all.



Still, The Expanse is pretty great, isn't it? I"ve been trying to make it last by just watching one every night or two, and I smile in genuine joy every time they remember some physics thing or some group of Martian punks forgets that Bobbi learned to fight in Earth gravity. My only small complaint is that we're now far enough from when it was on SyFy and they couldn't swear that they're comfortable just having Shoreh Aghdashloo let loose; it was maybe a bit more fun when she saved the f-bombs for special occasions.

I paired it with Too Old to Die Young most nights, finally getting through the end of that, and… Yikes. It's like they pitched it to Amazon with the part of the story starring Miles Teller, came up with almost nothing at all there, decided it would be more interesting to use that as an entry point for the stories of Jesus and Yaritza, and only came up with a bit more there, but still decided to make 9 episodes running about 75 minutes each and a half-hour epilogue that kind of goes nowhere. Much as I've loved Ed Brubaker's comics and a lot of Nicolas Winding Refn's movies, this really became a self-indulgent mess.

It was long enough to leave me looking for something with a relatively short running time Tuesday night, which is how I pulled Ghosts of the Abyss out of the pile of recent disc purchases just as something an hour long that isn't part of something bigger. As I was in the middle of playing with 3D stuff, it was pretty nifty to see all of that used well.

By the end of the week, I was the only person going into the office and probably could have ducked out early to see Star Wars or something, but instead wound up staying a bit late on Friday because I had some time to get to Only Cloud Knows, the new film from director Feng Xiaogang, which is kind of an odd one: Very pretty to look at, some nice bits, but really no story, because everything is happening to the characters as opposed to them doing anything. On the other hand, it's based on the writer's actual life, and sometimes it happens that way.

Saturday was the date for which I'd bought my ticket to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker a couple of months ago, betting that the theater would have finished their upgrade to Imax Laser by then, but apparently not. I'm probably going to have to see it again to give it a full and proper review, but from a technical standpoint, it's really a shame Disney has more or less completely given up on releasing discs in 3D format and audiences have turned away from 3D in theaters, because the conversion jobs for the sequel trilogy have looked amazing, and if I didn't know better, I'd guess that the trailer for Black Widow that played before it was shot that way rather than converted.

The next day was spent going from one craft fair to another, because that's the most certain way to get unique and interesting gifts for people you don't see every day. Almost worn down enough at the end to skip my plan of going back to Boston Common for Sheep Without a Shepherd, which I'd kind of feared was having its showtimes sacrificed for bigger movies in the same was as Integrity earlier this year, but, no, it's actually really good.

Also worth noting: The two Chinese movies had trailers for Mokoto Shinkai's Weathering with You, which I just realized was the first time I'd actually seen a preview before seeing one of his movies, and it makes me a little sad, because there's a shot or two in there I'd have liked to be gobsmacked with without warning. Between them, there were also previews for that Portrait of a Lady on Fire movie that everybody's been talking up - and, yes, it looks pretty darn great - as well as Wendy, which I just heard of now but which looks amazing.

Next few days will be quiet on my Letterboxd page, since I'm writing this on a train to see my family for Christmas, but there's plenty I want to see after.

Ghosts of the Abyss

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 December 2019 in Jay's Living Room (watching discs, 3D Blu-ray)

Plucked from the pile of recent before-they're-gone 3D disc purchases because it's short, this nevertheless proved an excellent way to wind down for the evening, with cool science and nifty visuals and just the right amount of reverence to give potentially bland material a little oomph and just enough going wrong for a minor climax at the end. The late Bill Paxton makes excellent company as a regular guy who, by dint of being James Cameron's friend and frequent collaborator, is fortunate enough to have the chance to see something amazing; he sometimes struggles to find the words to really convey his awe in the same way most of us would, and doesn't take what he gets to be a part of for granted.

That awe is earned, though, as the footage they came back with is amazing, and James Cameron knows how to stitch an expedition that is not designed to have a plot into a movie. He's aware of the irony of bringing all of this cutting-edge technology (which remains cool 15 years later) to bear to explore something that became a cautionary tale, but isn't deterred. He's good with using visual effects and unusual editing to expand on what his submersibles can see of the sunken Titanic without diminishing it as the main show, which applies to showing off and explaining the tech itself.

Sometimes I wish he'd make more movies, especially as the second half of his career looks to be consumed by the Avatar series which, let's face it, has an uncertain pop-cultural footprint. On the other hand, this adventure is part of the reason why I'm very anxious to see what he comes up with there - that way that he will build a way to follow his passions in film and science is a level of commitment that few others in the industry can match, and always results in something that will make the viewer gasp at some point.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 21 December 2019 in AMC Boston Common #2 (first-run, Imax-branded 3D)

It's probably going to take me a second viewing to decide whether this movie is genuinely bad, with most of what I enjoyed being a Pavlovian reaction to John Williams's score, or just a decent movie that is nevertheless a massive letdown because it follows (and in some ways undermines) the series's best entry in 40 years, but I guess it says something that I'm willing to consider that second viewing It's Star Wars, and even the messiest and most flawed movies in the franchise have had something to impress.

This one's tough, though, because in a lot of ways, The Last Jedi felt like it was ending Star Wars as we knew it and starting something new, with a less dynastic center and some challenges to how things had always been done, whereas Abrams was charged with wrapping up a series that was built around the dynasty, and he has some interesting ideas for that. It's still often a big mess in the execution, though, covered up by the absolutely fantastic production values that Disney/Lucasfilm can throw at something with "Star Wars" in the title.

Like I said, it's gonna need a second viewing. Fortunately, I kind of want to check out the big screen at Causeway Street anyway.

These Weeks in Tickets: 5 May 2019 - 19 May 2019

A weird couple weeks, where a lot of moviegoing got concentrated.





Doubly stubless: The Red Sox crushed the Mariners on 10 May, and there wasn't even a good place to mark it down on the page.

No stub for Friday night's game both because the team didn't give me physical tickets this year and because I decided to head into New York the next day to catch some movies and those tickets were kind of sizable. I actually pondered taking a late bus after the game, but that didn't seem like a great idea. The good night's sleep was probably a good plan, though that Mostly Manhattan Movie Marathon was kind of tight, with the subway eating up pretty much all my time between Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché,Long Day's Journey Into Night, Fugue, All Is True, and Pokémon Detective Pikachu, before the inevitable reminder that Greyhound is what you do when absolutely nothing else is practical (if you've got a week's notice, it's literally cheaper to fly than take the train from Boston to New York).

I wasn't completely zonked on Sunday, but there was some caffeine necessary for the other film I wanted to see that weekend, Zhang Yimou's Shadow, which is pretty darn terrific. It was a near thing to see that before receiving my 4K disc from Hong Kong (it turns out one will be released in North America, but that's hard to predict with smaller distributors), but there wasn't any doubt; it's a heck of a big-screen movie.

Speaking of such things....



The next Tuesday's movie was Star Wars at Symphony Hall with the Keith Lockhart conducting the Pops to provide the score, and that is a fun night out. It turned out to be a tight squeeze despite the way the ticketing site made the orchestra section look, but, hey, it's a movie, and should be. It is, of course, a great movie, and more so this way, even without looking up during the moments when there was no John Williams to play and seeing who in the orchestra was looking down and who was watching the movie.

Next up: John Wick 3, which is what it says on the tin - two hours of the sort of violence John Woo and Chow Yun-fat used to make. It may be a little more heavy on the mythology and self-aware than I'd like, but it delivers the goods.

Friday was about staying in and not getting caught in the rain, but it made for a nifty double feature on Saturday: The nifty Swedish science fiction epic Aniara at the Kendall and then a 70mm print of The Dark Crystal at the Somerville. Both are apocalyptic in their ways, and well worth seeing on the big screen if you get the opportunity.

Then on Sunday came an encore screening of Avengers: Endgame, both because I didn't see it under ideal conditions the first time and because, hey, it's pretty darn great. It's amazing that Marvel stuck the landing on this.

More my Letterboxd page since, although the downright crazy moviegoing has kind of slowed down..

Star Wars

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 14 May 2019 in Symphony Hall (Special Edition, digital with live orchestral accompaniment)

This movie is pretty darn good, folks. That's not surprising - global media empires generally can't start from nothing - but it can sometimes get lost in all the sequels and later incarnations and tie-ins and people who have very strong opinions. This event, which so far as I know is just the original, albeit in Special Edition form, and just watching that, unattached to the rest, is an unusual experience these days.

(Although if the Pops wanted to do this every few weeks until The Rise of Skywalker comes out, I'd be good with that too.)

Seeing it like this highlights just how well George Lucas tapped straight into a lot of things early on - youthful rebellion, older generations that in some cases meant the best but always had their own agenda, the thrill of adventure and the massive technological monsters lying in wait. The mysticism of The Force which is so often seized upon actually feels a little hokey, and thinking about Lucas's career (and the saga) in retrospect, it's kind of hard to know whether this is a sign of cynicism or just him not fully able to articulate something. It also illustrates just how much the film and the franchise owes to Sir Alec Guinness's work - he may famously have had no love for what became his most famous role, but he got Obi-Wan, giving glimpses of the warrior in exile who knew how to weaponize his worldliness and Luke's inexperience. That Lucas could build out this mythology is in no small part due to Guinness hinting at complexity.

Twenty-odd years on, the Special Edition updates have aged faster than the practical work from 1977, enough to push me from not really minding them to hoping Disney gives us 4K versions of the original cuts at the first opportunity. On the other hand, one of the interesting things about this presentation was how they suggest that maybe films should not always be entirely frozen in amber - especially in the second half, Maestro Lockhart's arrangements occasionally seemed just different enough from those of John Williams to notice, and it helped make an old favorite a bit more new and thrilling.

Star Wars evolves, even when you're getting back to basics.

The Dark Crystal

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 May 2019 in Somerville Theatre #1 (70mm and Widescreen Festival, 70mm)

My fondness for this one fluctuates as I see it; it is, on the one hand, a bold and remarkable achievement, a pure fantasy that somehow got financed and into theaters despite being utterly unlike anything audiences have seen before except maybe the works of Jan Svankmajer, and that's not exactly mainstream itself. On the other, there is a Muppet-y chaos underneath the grandiosity, the sense of humor maybe undercutting Jim Henson's ideas for an epic story. It doesn't quite work when it can't blow the viewer's mind, although it's still admirable.

Digging through the blog, I'm mildly amused to note that the first time I blogged seeing it, in 2005, I mention a sequel that the Henson family is working on, and that project is just emerging now, a limited-series prequel that will be on Netflix at the end of August. I find myself wondering if the lore is really sturdy enough to support that sort of expansion - or if it can be done without dragging the tone away from Henson's anarchy.

Avengers: Endgame

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2019 in AMC Boston Common #8 (first-run, RealD 3D DCP)
Seen 19 May 2019 in AMC Assembly Row #1 (first-run, Imax digital)

A second time through, this time in IMAX rather than 3D, confirms that this is maybe not perfect or hefty, but it is tremendously satisfying. The filmmakers have two jobs here - the biggest superhero action movie ever made and a satisfying conclusion to teen years of build-up - and somehow they pull both off and make each half complement the other.

I love the way they built this thing, using a time-travel plot so that everything is a reminder of (and revisit to) all of the ways that the audience has enjoyed the previous movies. It mixes up the pure fun and the grace notes so that the movie never feels empty or cloying, and serves up little surprises that make the audience smile stupidly. All of what the audience has seen before matters, but it's not just homework, and the combined retconning/demolition is awfully clever (and in many cases, the sort of thing you can only do when you know you won't have to deal with the fallout). It's also weirdly reassuring that a bunch of people who didn't have to come back did. They apparently like this stuff too, and weren't just collecting a paycheck.

The execution is good; the action isn't exactly what we got in John Wick 3 a few days ago (little is), but as "enough special effects to fill an IMAX screen" goes, it's solid even from the second row, and the cast all has these guys down pat to the point where the ones that aren't returning will be genuinely missed. But like their characters, they've given a lot over the past decade, and now, as with any big comic book event, it's time to see what the new faces and new arrangements can bring.

This Week In Tickets: 28 May 2018 - 3 June 2018

The spread below is clearly the work of an aging dork whose favorite baseball team is doing just well enough to keep him home watching the game rather than going outto see a movie I may be on the fence about.

(There may have been rain, too)



After a pretty busy weekend, I recoveredon the actual holiday and was lucky enough to have Tuesday off too - we kicked off a bunchh of processes at work that we didn't figure would finish until then (mine crapping out midway through). Gave me a chance to see Solo: A Star Wars Story a second time, this time in 2D at the Seaport's premium theater, and that's a good call. It's a pretty good movie, but it's also one where a chance to see it a second time, on its own terms rather than with the baggage you bring in, certainly doesn't hurt. Also not hurting - both screenings were 4K laser, which helps this movie particularly.

It was a quiet rest of the week because a new Star Wars movie sucks the air out of the multiplexes a bit, but I was looking forward to Upgrade. Not one I reallly loved, but it does a few things very well, and the folks who like their bloody 1980s sci-fi/horror should dig it.

Then at midnight, I hit the second and final show of How to Talk to Girls at Parties, which was also kind of neat but ended too late for me to catch the 66 bus halfway home afterward, and I walked much too far trying to find a cab rather than just calling one. Left me pretty wiped on Sunday, and shaking my fist at the sky a little bit when the Brattle announced they would have it at non-midnight hours a week and a half later.

With the big movie out of the way, there's a ton next weekend. Rough drafts on my Letterboxd account, as usual..

Upgrade

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen on 2 June 2018 in AMC Boston Common #11 (first-run, DCP)

The direct descendant of all those 1980s movies that had a ton of cyberpunk ideas and a matching tendency toward blood and guts, Upgrade at least never seems stuck in that particular past; it's the 2018 version with a little extra snark and a lot more ease in telling this sort of story to a wider audience. It's mean and nasty and only acknowledges that its violence might mess the characters up briefly, slickly and skillfully made by guys who maybe like the splatter a little too much. Not quite my thing

That said, they're good at it, sometimes seeming to use CGI in the background not just because it's less expensive for some things or more efficient for constructing an extremely detailed world, but to emphasize how tactile other parts are. Writer/director Leigh Whannell and his crew are pretty good at staging the Jackie Chan-type stuff that naturally comes from a man out for revenge having a computer that knows everything operating his body, and star Logan Marshall Green gives a great physical performance in all of his movements, even if he (and the rest of the cast, to be honest) are kind of bland as characters.

It doesn't necessarily fizzle at the end, in that the finale is more or less the culmination of everything that has come before, but it's also kind of unsatisfying. Whannell gives it the end that a certain type of sci-fi fan often asks for, but it's unsatisfying, not just because one's instinct is to root for a certain thing, but because everything leading to it winds up feeling like something retroacttively included to justify a gotcha moment as opposed to something that came out of the moment.

This Week In Tickets: 21 May 2018 - 27 May 2018

It may push bedtime back an hour or two, but I'm getting "This Week" up before "Next Week". What can I say, sometimes you just have a lot of Star Wars opinions to get out.



First up this week was Raazi, a distinctly Indian spy thriller that starts slow but really picks up around the intermission mark. Ultimately, it winds up being pretty nifty, even if it lays the patriotic stuff on pretty thick for a genre where you tend to see more ambiguity.

It was the sort of big summer week where you can not just leave the week open, but catch some sports because one or two things are going to be grabbing all the screens. With a holiday coming up, we were let out of work early on Friday, which meant no trouble getting from Burlington to Fenway in time for a fun romp over the Braves, the sort where J.D. Martinez ties Mookie Betts for the league lead in homers but Mookie pulls back ahead, and Xander & Mitch Moreland hit one at well. Plus a JBJ triple, getting him out of the funk.

Saturday was a Memorial Day Weekend miracle, as I was able to get to Jordan's on two buses (technically three, as the 136 out becomes the 137 in and the 137 is the one that passes the furniture store) with time to spare. That never happens, and it might not have if I'd just checked the MBTA's website, which had me using three or four buses and the subway, while Google just said to take the 101 to Malden. I'm glad all that worked out, because Solo: A Star Wars Story demands to be seen well-projected, and Jordan's in Reading is probably the only place in the area I'd trust with a 3D show, between the laser projection and active-shutter glasses. I then got lucky, transit-wise, on the back end, just making the 137 and able to switch to the Orange Line. I somewhat appropratiely got off that train at the Chinatown stop and was able to slide into the Boston Common theater for How Long Will I Love U. Cute enough, but not so clever as I'd hoped.

I didn't originally order tickets for Sunday's ballgame before the start of the season, but when the Red Sox announced there would be a three-inning "alumni game" before the main one... Sure, I'll spend a little cash on a good seat for that. It was sloppy, but fun, and as a fan, how many chances to you get to see Pedro Martinez, Bill Lee, Oil Can Boyd, Mike Greenwell, Sam Horn, Wade Boggs, and a ton more play in the same game? Not many! That was kind of all the star power we were going to get, though, as the lineup for the main game lacked Betts and Martinez, and this team is not quite so fun without them. On top of that, Chris Sale had the rare bad game, it was chilly and windy, and the Red Sox lost 7-1. At least it didn't last that long, and I was able to make a quick trip up the Green Line to catch On Chesil Beah. Not bad, but I'm kind of glad I didn't spend a festival slot on it, you know?

Ah, well. Time to get started on the "Next Week" post and figure out what's going to be the next entry on my Letterboxd page.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

For all that this movie has generated what one might oxymoronically call "strong apathy" - the thing where people make an effort to tell you how much they don't care, that they're feeling "Star Wars fatigue", or that doing a project like this makes the franchise irrelevant, etc. - it kind of fascinates me beyond my thinking that it's a fun sci-fi action flick.

For instance, the fact that directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, a team known for surprising and idiosyncratic films, were fired extraordinarily late in filming to be replaced with Ron Howard, who is often dismissed as blandly capable at best, is easy to dismiss as studio suits going for the safe choice rather than dealing with actually creative people. And there may have been some of that going on, but it's also sometimes worth remembering that sometimes you need the steady guy, especially when you're looking at a schedule and feeling a lot of uncertainty. Lord & Miller are, apparently, big into improvisation and "finding it in the edit", and if you're staring down a deadline and also planning to tie this movie in with other things, those must be terrifying words for a producer to hear.

And I suspect that Kathleen Kennedy hasn't had to hear them that much; she's spent much of her career producing Steven Spielberg's movies, and while Spielberg leaves room for his cast and crew to work, he's famous for knowing the movie he wants to make going in, communicating that to everyone involved, and then finishing early and under budget. Combine that with a screenwriter who, having mostly directed his own scripts in recent decades, is used to seeing what he wrote on-screen, and even if Lord & Miller's dailies did feel like what the producers wanted, they'd still be nervous. Going to Howard - who literally grew up on film and television sets and cut his teeth as a director working for Roger Corman - is a pretty smart move.

I don't necessarily think that this dooms Star Wars to being bland, corporate product. First, I wouldn't necessarily classify Solo as such; second, it's worth remembering the early years of Marvel, which were filled with directors like Jon Favreau, Louis Leterrier, Kenneth Branagh, and Joss Whedon, who are good at what they do but not exactly visionaries or guys who leave a distinct, obvious stamp on movies. It took a while for Marvel to get to the point where they were comfortable letting James Gunn, Shane Black, Taika Waititi, and Ryan Coogler build something their own within the framework. I suspect that Lucasfilm is just about there, and maybe Solo is their Ant-Man, the experience that teaches when to hold the reins tight and when to cut some slack.

You get past that, though, and the fact that it's very much an Expanded Universe thing that somehow made its way to the big screen. There have been stories about the pre-A New Hope Han before, of course, and what's kind of amazing is that this movie acknowledges them and everything else that Lucasfilm has over the years published in other media to feed the appetite of hungry fans, from Brian Daley's Han Solo novels to Aurra Sing to things in various animated series, even including a fictional form of martial arts only previously mentioned in a well-forgotten video game. It's a fun easter egg hunt for those who kept up on all of that stuff and retained it better than me, and even I smiled kind of stupidly when Lando mentioned that he once won one of the moons of Oseon in a game of sabacc. That's kind of a deep cut, going back over 35 years to a series of novels written by L. Neil Smith.

And while there are some who are going to resent that sort of fanservice - though in most cases, the stuff you don't recognize might as well be "that bounty hunter on Ord Mantell" Han mentions toward the start of The Empire Strikes Back, a bunch of nonsense words that sound good and create the illusion of a bigger universe. I understand the reticence at filling in the blanks like this, but I also think a lot of people are dismissing the joy of doing so a little lightly. To say you don't need to see Han Solo's origin story is to suggest that making Star Wars has some singular purpose of getting through Episode IX, which completes some important metaphor or is otherwise more important than a bunch of adventure stories with spaceships and laser swords.

I'm not entirely unsympathetic; I started gobbling a lot of this tie-in material up with Timothy Zahn's novels twenty-five years ago and was fairly completist until I found myself out of work and realizing that I did not recognize the character on the cover of the latest entry in Del Rey's massive series about invaders from outsider the galaxy. I stepped away then and found other obsessions once I got a new job, and wound up dipping my toe back into the pool mainly when the new material stayed close to the characters I already knew and loved - I ignored a lot of Dark Horse's comics until they started a new series set between Star Wars and Empire, for instance, but I know plenty of other folks who have no interest in those series, preferring spin-offs where the main character isn't part of the movie narrative and can therefore be killed.

There's room enough for both of those bands of fans, and it's why I'm not nearly as worked up about Solo's relatively low box-office as some. Not every new Star Wars movie needs to appeal to everybody who has ever liked one, $100M is still a lot of money, and from what I gather it's well-enough received by those who have seen it that it could wind up with good legs and a long tail on video. Indeed, Disney/Lucasfilm accepting that not every one of these movies is going to be a juggernaut might be the best thing for the series long-term, even if some huge success stories have conditioned us not to recognize steady performance as success.

And is that all? Nope, the very act of watching the movie has pushed something of niche interest - theatrical presentation - to the forefront. I started reading people talking about how Solo is shot dark and it's hard to see some faces during the press screenings, and this did affect where I went to see it on Saturday a bit: I like going to Jordan's Furniture in Reading a fair amount anyway, but knowing that they've got one of the brightest/highest-resolution screens in the area was good to know, especially since I opted for 3D, and they've got great active-shutter glasses there, blocking much less light than the polarized RealD glasses most places use and even the LCD glasses I have at home. Seeing how the lighting worked, I then decided to go to the Icon cinema in the Seaport for a second screening when I had a random day off on Tuesday ($10 for the deluxe screen with their app), since they also had 4K laser projection. It's noticeable that even someone like me who prefers actual film and proper matting but will settle for "good enough" at the theater without a lot of argument most days was being kind of particular.

But good luck trying to explain that to a lot of the movie's audience, though. The amount of light theaters use is not something most people think about, and even if they do, it's easier to place the blame on the filmmakers, because the booth is supposed to be standardized and full of technicians rather than artists, guys concerned with just getting it right. Most won't think about it in that sort of detail, though; they'll just come out, thinking the experience wasn't as good as they thought it should be, and dislike the movie and/or the experience of going to the movies, and carry that forward. And that's no indictment of them; I know a lot of people who are really into eating or drinking well, but I'm not, and I don't really have the ability to break down whether the service, what I ordered, or some ingredient in the particular dish being off will have me deciding that visiting a restaurant again in the future (or eating out in general) is not a priority.

Anyway, I've been telling people to check this out on premium screens, just because it's a better bet, but that's just one of many things about this movie that takes a lot of untangling.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 May 2018 in Jordan's Furniture Reading (first-run, 4K laser Imax 3D)
Seen 29 May 2018 in Showcase Icon Seaport #6 (first-run, 4K laser Icon-X DCP)

There are degrees of fandom for big properties like Star Wars, and the companies who own these properties have long created enough material to ensure that everyone can get as much as they want, especially when there were relatively long, fallow periods between main events. These tie-in materials are by their nature inessential, and even conditional - they are sometimes contradicted and booted out of canon - but, despite being more clearly created for mercenary purposes and being inconsequential by certain measurements, these secondary additions to the franchise can be quality entertainment. That's the sort of movie Solo is, tie-in material that wound up getting a big-screen budget and doing fairly well with it.

Indeed, Solo embraces the Star Wars fan who wants to take a deeper dive into its worlds in a way that I don't think any franchise like this ever has in the stuff made for the core, mainstream audience. It drops references to the mooted Expanded Universe and even the late-1970s/early-1980s tie-in novels in the same way that the original would mention unseen characters and events to give texture, and it's kind of fun nonsense whether it's nonsense words or sly winks to a given viewer.

In this particular go-around at showing the early years of the saga's smuggler with a heart of gold, Han (Alden Ehrenreich) is a scrumrat on Corellia, whose main export appears to be be ships for the Galactic Empire. He's managed to swipe a container of valuable hyperspace fuel so that he and girlfriend Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke) can bribe their way off-planet, though only he makes it. He enlists to learn to fly but winds up in the infantry, eventually deserting to join a pack of thieves led by Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson) alongside his girlfriend Val (Thandie Newton), pilot Rio (voice of Jon Favreau), and new friend Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo). When a job goes sideways, Beckett and Han must convince Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany), a Crimson Dawn gangster, to give them a chance to make things up. Fortunately, Qi'ra has risen in the organization to become Vos's lieutenant, and not only puts in a good word for Han, but helps them recruit smugglers Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) and L3-37 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and their ship, the Millennium Falcon.

Full review on EFC