STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI
(FANTASY/ACTION-ADVENTURE)
★★
Directed by Rian Johnson
Screenplay by Rian Johnson
Starring: Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Domhnall Gleeson, Andy Serkis, Laura Dern, Benicio del Toro, Kelly Marie Tran, Billie Lourd, Gwendoline Christie, Anthony Daniels, Lupita Nyong'o
Rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action and violence.
152 minutes
Verdict: With a minimalist plot needlessly stretched into the longest runtime in the series, with a confusingly cartoony and flippant approach, Rian Johnson's entry in the Star Wars saga is among the weakest, despite some strong ideas and visuals.
This review contains details that may be considered minor spoilers.
You could say THE FORCE AWAKENS played things safe, but it should be acknowledged how bold and brash that movie was in its efforts to return the Star Wars franchise into something "safe." In its execution, THE FORCE AWAKENS is a very fun movie, buoyant in tone, filled with inventive but familiar action, evocative imagery and carried by great new characters like Rey, Finn and BB-8; but in story and substance, THE FORCE AWAKENS is hollow, essentially reprising the original 1977 STAR WARS to an absurd degree (listening to Michael Kaminski's exhaustively researched book, The Secret History of Star Wars, recently, it's remarkable how similar even the THE FORCE AWAKENS's superficial differences from the 1977 are to that script's earlier drafts), and going frustratingly out of its way to return the story to the original trilogy's status quo. Yes, the Rebel Alliance claimed victory over the Galactic Empire at the end of RETURN OF THE JEDI, but by the beginning of THE FORCE AWAKENS, Leia is already commanding a "Resistance" against an improbably well-funded paramilitary organization carrying on the legacy of the Empire, now called "The First Order" (even as they represent the establishment governing body, the New Republic, the Resistance is meant to be a Rebellion-style scrappy band of fighters). By the halfway mark of the movie, the entire game board has been reset with the complete and utter destruction of the New Republic, and I guess the First Order is supposed to be the new version of the Empire even though they don't really have any established political power, and the Resistance is basically just the Rebel Alliance all over again. At this point, they're just two paramilitary organizations fighting each other across space for some vague notion of power versus democracy or something. It's fun in spots, but also lacks meaning.
With THE LAST JEDI, Rian Johnson, the writer/director of LOOPER, THE BROTHERS BLOOM and BRICK, takes a stab at the franchise with considerably more creative freedom than Abrams was afforded by the difficult position of rebooting the franchise ten years after George Lucas's much-maligned prequel trilogy. For better or worse, Johnson exercises much of that freedom in thumbing his nose at what's come before, frequently subverting expectations more for the sake of being subversive than in service of a worthwhile thematic construct, then earnestly positioning itself as a new direction for the series, but not necessarily a more interesting direction. Like THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, THE LAST JEDI follows a much more stripped down and looser plot than its immediate predecessor, but THE LAST JEDI does not strive to be the EMPIRE-inspired "dark sequel" of the sequel trilogy. In fact, it's cartoony. Not just light in tone, and not humormous in the style that THE FORCE AWAKENS introduced to the series; no, it's goofy. In addition to sight gags that go beyond the organic cleverness of BB-8 flashing a thumbs-up lighter and into Robot Chicken territory, many of the characters are self-aware archetypes and act in ways that appear to consciously make light of themselves and the narrative. It doesn't exactly feel like the Star Wars I know and love, while the speechifying about moving forward and not dwelling on what came before tells me I should be okay with that, but if it doesn't feel like Star Wars, what's the point of all this?
The story picks up almost immediately where THE FORCE AWAKENS left off, with Rey (Daisy Ridley) on the Jedi steps at Ahch-To seeking training from the legendary Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), who turns out to not be quite what she'd expected after his years in self-imposed exile, following the turn to the Dark Side of his nephew and apprentice, Ben Solo, now known as Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). Meanwhile, the base of the Resistance has been exposed following their successful campaign against Starkiller Base, so Luke's sister, General Leia Organa (the late Carrie Fisher, to whom the movie is dedicated) is forced to evacuate with the help of the skilled but hot-headed Resistance pilot, Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac). During the evacuation, the Resistance sustains heavy losses and is trapped by the evil First Order's forces, led by the mysterious Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis, beneath CGI performance-capture), Snoke's apprentice Kylo Ren, and the sniveling General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson). In order to shake the First Order off the Resistance's trail, defected First Order stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega) teams up with a maintenance worker named Rose (Kelly Marie Tran, channeling an obnoxiously anime-style character) to find a codebreaker who can help them.
Especially in the context of Star Wars, its worth noting that THE LAST JEDI is 152 minutes long, a whole half hour longer than the original 1977 film, and the longest in the series so far, 10 minutes longer than the next runner up, EPISODE II- ATTACK OF THE CLONES. Granted, there are longer movies than 152 minutes, and some of them are great movies, but considering that the original STAR WARS is setting up this original fictional galaxy entirely, introducing at least seven iconic characters (Luke, Han, Leia, Vader, Obi-Wan, C-3PO and R2-D2; I'm willing to hear arguments for Tarkin), a religion, politics, and more, while finding ample time for great, stunning action sequences and character development, all in a nice, tight two hours, the fact that a movie that does as little as THE LAST JEDI insists on being a full 25% longer is just obnoxious. To be fair, EPISODE III- REVENGE OF THE SITH is 140 minutes, and while I'd say that's also too long, it has a lot more to deal with and makes much better use of that time. This kind of runtime on THE LAST JEDI is lazy and undisciplined, but reportedly, Johnson's rough cut was three hours long, which is head-scratching given how thin and ultimately inconsequential the plot actually is.
THE LAST JEDI is not without its strong ideas. It attempts to introduce some fresh moral gray areas into the conflict between Kylo Ren, Rey, the Resistance and the First Order, and like it or not (sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't), there's no denying that the movie expands the view of the Star Wars galaxy into new areas of exploration. There's lots of little things that fans are likely to love, regardless of substance, such as a moment involving alien creatures with conspicuous udders, but these are the superficial things like Aunt Beru's blue milk. Everyone who's noticed Beru pouring a cup of blue milky liquid in the original film gets a kick out of references to blue milk, but that's not why people love Star Wars. Many of the visuals are striking, and there's certainly some gorgeous action sequences, most notably the well-advertised battle between a collection of rusty, low-flying Resistance craft with plows that stir up red dirt against a line of updated AT-AT walkers on a salty white planet surface. There are a few good moments of starfighter action, in addition to a lot more time spent with Poe Dameron than was in the previous film, but that extra time reveals him not to be so much the cocky and brash but talented pilot as much as he's a borderline psychopath who leaves a trail of destruction in his wake on both sides. The action is spread fairly thin though over the extended runtime, and most disappointing of all is the distinct shortage of lightsaber action. There's a good action sequence with a lot of lightsaber carnage, but fans of a good lightsaber duel will be sorely disappointed.
THE FORCE AWAKENS is definitely rocky in spots; rushed and occasionally lazy in its narrative, essentially remaking the original STAR WARS, but it succeeded in introducing a trio of great new characters in Rey, Finn and BB-8, all of whom are reduced to much smaller and less interesting roles this time around. It's unlikely that J.J. Abrams had much in the way of honest answers for all the questions he left hanging at the end of his movie and was more interested in posing the questions in the first place, and whether its answering them or not, Rian Johnson's film doesn't put a lot of thought into them either. With the exception of a few well-designed sequences, like the aforementioned AT-AT battle, the visuals are also significant step down from Abrams's admittedly imitative style, and it lacks that movie's sense of joy, hollow or not.
As easy as it is to speak negatively about the film, I didn't hate THE LAST JEDI. I didn't like it much either. I hope I'll come to enjoy it more when I get around to rewatching it (although, that extra long runtime doesn't help in that regard), but upon seeing it for the first time, my main thought was, "I'm not sure if it's the worst movie of the series, but I'm not sure it's not." Previously, I might have put that on ATTACK OF THE CLONES, but for as clunky and poorly executed as that movie is many technical aspects, its concepts are more interesting, its action is more spectacular and fun, and its emotions, overwrought as they may be in practice, are still more engaging. THE LAST JEDI has better dialogue and acting, but that can only amplify a movie of this kind, not make it. It lacks a real point.
Thematically, the movie suggests the leaving behind of the old for the
ushering in of the new, but it's a cold comfort when the 'new' is a Star
Wars movie that doesn't feel like Star Wars.
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| Images via Lucasfilm |
An easy way to turn a turd into a multi-generational favorite is to make it a Christmas turd. The holidays turn some of us into big gooey, sentimental and nostalgic messes, and even when it's crap, anything that reminds us of those happy days of yore benefits from our yuletide emotional vulnerability. It's a time of year where people will actually buy "traditions," in one of the weirdest phenomenons of capitalism, like that creepy-ass, pedo-smiling "elf" that parents now put on their shelves to drag out the holiday gift-getting, and now they do it year after year because the marketing campaign told them to. Let's face it, the holidays turn a lot of us into morons, and commerce, including Hollywood, knows it. It doesn't matter if a movie is "solid-gold shit," as they say; if someone grew up with it, especially as part of their childhood holiday viewing cycle (and God knows, Millennials being so unscrupulously nostalgic and the ABC Family programming churned out in the later part of that generation's adolescence), it's going to become a tradition, maybe even a "classic" of sorts. That doesn't mean they're not garbage. These movies are garbage. It's okay. You can still like them, but they are garbage.
HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS
(FANTASY/COMEDY, 2000)
Directed by Ron Howard
Screenplay by Jeffrey Price & Peter Seaman
Based on the book by Dr. Seuss
Starring: Jim Carrey, Taylor Momsen, Jeffrey Tambor, Christine Baranski, Bill Irwin, Molly Shannon, Clint Howard, Josh Ryan Evans, Mindy Sterling, Rachel Winfree, Rance Howard, Jeremy Howard, T.J. Thyne, Mary Stein
Rated PG for some crude humor.
104 minutes
The year 2000 was not a great one for movies. Perhaps it's because everyone in 1999 was so sure the world would end that they thought that movies in the coming millennium wouldn't matter, so they didn't put as much effort in. Good but not great GLADIATOR won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and the highest-grossing movie internationally was MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II, the sweaty perineum of the Mission: Impossible franchise, while stateside, the biggest movie of the year was a fuzzy green turd soup called HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS. First, it was classic 1957 storybook from the imagination of Dr. Seuss, then it was a charming, inventive 1966 Chuck Jones animated TV special, and finally, it was new millennium that brought with it this odorous shart. Jim Carrey, the sometimes good but often obnoxious comedian who soared on wings of obnoxious hyperactivity to 1990s stardom, headlines beneath a furry green fat suit, a silicone mask and yellow contacts as the titular Grinch; a furry, green curmudgeon who lives on a stylish garbage dump mountain overhanging "Whoville", where all the Christmas-loving Whos (basically people except they're ugly as hell with nasty chipmunk teeth and disgusting snouts) live. THE GRINCH may have been released in November 2000, but it is pure '90s, oozing with that garish Joel Schumacher's Batman/laser tag aesthetic that permeated over-stylized big budget movies of the last few years in the 20th century. The movie opens with, of all horrible things, a group of teenagers like you might expect to pop up in a cliched horror movie (except that have that nasty-ass Who makeup on their faces), daring each other to get a peek at the infamous Grinch. There's a whole bunch of weird world-expanding plot threads added to pump the simple story up to a feature-length running time, and it's all informed by a very dated '90s pop culture worldview that's just weird. There's a love triangle between the Grinch, the Mayor of Whoville (Jeffrey Tambor) and the uncomfortably sexualized Martha May Whovier (Christine Baranski). A love triangle. Involving the Grinch. This is the kind of crap that you're supposed to read about as deleted concepts described on IMDb's trivia page where you can wonder if it's accurate or not, but they put in the movie here. Oh, and there's a definite acknowledgement of sexuality in the Who experience, so now you have to picture those nasty little Whos with their nasty little noses and innocent-but-in-a-kinky-way personalities doing dirty things in bed. There's a gag about how Whos are born, that is, they float down from the sky in little gondolas to their parents' doorsteps, and when one would-be father examines the baby that just landed outside the door, he remarks to his wife, "He looks just like your boss." That means the Whos have affairs. It's left up to the imagination just how the babies wind up in those gondolas, but it's clear that there's good old fashioned whoopie-making involved. Soon after, the Who women that the baby Grinch winds up with are having a "key party," which, as anyone who's seen Ang Lee's THE ICE STORM knows, is where swingers drop their car keys into a bowl for drawing later to decide which random person they're going home with to do sex with. Those dirty, dirty Whos. Also, the Grinch makes a face-dive right into Christine Baranski's Christmas cleavage. We've established that it's filthy and looks like a '90s horror movie, which isn't inherently bad, but this soggy toilet sock goes hard for the commercialized sentimentality, too. Taylor Momsen, who plays Cindy Lou Who (no more than two in the original text, but here, she's about ten and old enough to reminisce about better Christmases), has to look cute, so she has none of the grotesque makeup of the other Whos, but she still looks like a moron, and her false "I just wanted Christmas to be perfect" sincerity is nauseating. The featured song of the film, "Where Are You Christmas", sung by Taylor Momsen in the actual film and by Faith Hill in the end credits, is a pox on the genitals of the holiday season, a crock of shit pretending to yearn for a purer, less commercialized Christmas while actually standing for the opposite. Christmas is on December 25, got it? It's not lost, you insufferable carnival barkers. As to the Grinch himself, this is where the movie truly shits the bed on an epic scale. The story of a bitter soul who's become jaded to the materialistic celebration of Christmas, but he's just misunderstood and when he learns what Christmas is really about, his heart grows and he's changed for the better; except this Grinch isn't misunderstood. He's genuinely a dick. He's not so much an asshole that he can't quite reconcile leaving Cindy Lou Who to be die in a gruesome post office accident (although he does debate with himself considerably over the issue), but even when he was a kid, before the cruelty of bullies supposedly led him to choose a career in professional dicktitude, the Grinch is a dick. As an infant, he giggles maliciously at knocking another one of the baby gondolas off-course, he bites the head off of a Santa plate, and as a child, he gleefully destroys other peoples' things in a montage where he makes a Christmas present for young Martha May Whovier in hopes of getting Christmas laid. So he's already a nasty little shit. After his supposed change, he's still obnoxious, and in the very final moments of the film, when he's joined the Whos for Christmas dinner and is carving the roast beast, the last lines are of the Grinch asking who wants the gizzard, then claiming it for himself like a dick. Like, what do you want us to feel, movie? Ugh, there are few things worse for a movie to be than this kind of cloying, sentimental bullshit without even having a heart to back it up. Shaggy, green, poo-smelling garbage. Garbage, I say!
THE POLAR EXPRESS
(FANTASY/ANIMATED-MUSICAL, 2004)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
Screenplay by Robert Zemeckis & William Broyles Jr.
Starring: Tom Hanks, Leslie Zemeckis, Eddie Deezen, Tinashe, Peter Scolari, Michael Jeter, Chris Coppola, Charles Fleischer, Steven Tyler, Daryl Sabara (voice), Nona Gaye (voice), Jimmy Bennett (voice), Andre Sogliuzzo
Rated G
100 minutes
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the early era motion-capture animated characters of THE POLAR EXPRESS looks like handsomely-lit dead human bodies being puppeteered like goddamn marionettes. But hey, if that's what Christmas magic is to you, who am I to argue. Eh, I don't care. Other early motion-capture animated movies have had their technological shortcomings but made it work though, and THE POLAR EXPRESS fails most importantly in its clumsy and desperate efforts to tug the heartstrings with nostalgia and feel-good innocence but instead winds up shoving a thick handful of treacly sentimentality up it own ass and trying desperately to keep that interesting for 100 minutes, occasionally tickling the prostate and coming up with extended boring set-pieces for the train to run into, but nobody cares and this movie should go dunk its head three times and pull back up twice. Outside of the human characters, who look dead and malevolent (like the inferi in the Harry Potter series; dead bodies that have been enchanted by a Dark Wizard's spell, except these inferi have gone rogue and are celebrating Christmas), the production design is sumptuous and the digital medium is ideal for recreating Chris Van Allsburg's clean and luminescent aesthetic. Robert Zemeckis, writer and director of the film, has a massive hard-on for this kind of technology, and POLAR EXPRESS is beautiful dick painting, swooping with an impossible camera through the wintery landscapes rendered in the computer, lingering for extended, decidedly non-subtle shots on a golden train ticket fluttering improbably through the wind. That's one way Zemeckis stretches 32-page storybook that's mostly paintings out into a feature run time. Another way he does this is with boring, drawn-out set-pieces like the train (which is simply on a trip to the North Pole, nothing more) like a big herd of caribou standing in the way, and a particularly absurd stretch in which the train slides off of the tracks and onto a frozen lake, then gets back on the tracks again. They also find time for a train ghost (Tom Hanks, along with five other roles) who has an absurdly forced laugh and harasses people who don't believe in bullshit with terrifying Victorian-style marionettes. Ugh, this should have been a short film, like half an hour at most. But even then, we have this lavishly produced fable for children about how logical thought is obnoxious and it's important to be a sap, which is probably why some people still believe that global warming is a Chinese hoax. THE POLAR EXPRESS begins with a young boy (physical performance by Tom Hanks, vocal performance by Daryl Sabara) trying to grow the hell up and come to terms with the fact that there's no omnipotent, elderly old man from the Arctic who breaks into his house at night and leaves presents. I mean, heck, if the kid was struggling with a similarly stupid belief like whether vaccines make you retarded or if legitimate rape causes pregnancy, we'd be rooting for him to him to stop being such an idiot and start acting like we live in the real world here, but if it's about Santa? Oh God, no, don't stop believing in Santa! Oh my hell, what a horrible, awful thing to not believe in Santa Fraud! Guess what, guys? News flash: SANTA ISN'T REAL! Dumbasses.
HOME ALONE
(COMEDY/FAMILY, 1990)
Directed by Chris Columbus
Screenplay by John Hughes
Starring: Macaulay Culkin, Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, John Heard, Roberts Blossom, Catherine O'Hara, Angela Goathels, Devin Ratray, Gerry Bamman, Hillary Wolf, John Candy, Larry Hankin, Michael C. Maronna, Kristin Minter, Ken Hudson Campbell, Kieran Culkin
Rated PG for unspecified reasons (slapstick action violence, language, some rude humor and thematic elements).
103 minutes
Kevin McCallister is a huge, gaping, sweaty, taco poo-smelling asshole. You know what would be really funny? A movie where Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern give Macaulay Culkin an atomic wedgie and threw him in the garbage before rooting through his rich family's house, clogging the sinks and having a merry Christmas while those McCallister dildos learn a little something-something about what really matters. Seriously, think about it; the biggest movie of 1990 was the story about an obnoxious kid from a rich family who gets ditched while his family goes to France over Christmas, and while his hot mom harasses everyone she comes into contact with in order to get home to the brat, the kid spends the holiday designing torture traps for poor people. What a shitty world. Yay for rich white people, violence, and asshole families reconciling with each other because it's a big, fat asshole Christmas. Yeah, yeah, kids rule and adults drool, whatever. The most annoying thing though is how, like THE GRINCH, it's a bunch of mean-spirited, awful people being awful, but then they try to shoehorn in a stupidly sentimental subplot between Kevin and Old Man Marley (Roberts Blossom), an old man who tells Kevin he's not a murderer even though he clearly is. Where'd you get that cut on your hand, Marley? Where'd you get that cut? Why do you need such a big bucket of salt? You're telling me you only need that much salt to salt the sidewalks? No mummy bodies in there at all, huh? What a load of bull. Catherine O'Hara though, what a peach.
THE SANTA CLAUSE
(FAMILY-COMEDY/FANTASY, 1994)
Directed by John Pasquin
Screenplay by Leo Benvenuti and Steven Rudnick
Starring: Tim Allen, Judge Reinhold, Wendy Crewson, Eric Lloyd, David Krumholtz, Larry Brandenburg, Mary Gross, Paige Tamada, Peter Boyle, Judith Scott, Jayne Eastwood, Melissa King, Kenny Vadas
Rated PG for a few crude moments.
97 minutes
On an awkward Christmas Eve shared between a divorced dad and his obnoxious son becomes even more awkward when the dad inadvertently kills (yes, kills) Santa Claus (yes, the Santa Claus) in their own front yard, setting in motion a course of events that will destroy his life as he knows it and damn him to an eternity of servitude and fatness. What is this off-kilter but chilling Christmas horror fable I'm talking about? Why, it's only Walt Disney Pictures' blood-curdling holiday classic, THE SANTA CLAUSE! By mistakenly killing a mythological figure he doesn't even believe in, successful advertising executive Scott Calvin (Tim Allen) is forced into become Santa Claus himself, cursed to surrender his identity and travel the entirety of the world annually to deliver gifts to all the greedy, grubby, gentile children. He'll no longer recognize his body as it rapidly ages (like that guy at the end of INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE) and as he develops excess fat at an impossible rate. Even his personality is no longer his own as he begins to crave sweet things like never before, he becomes consistently jolly and good natured, free will be damned... just like poor Scott Calvin. Trapped in a body that is no longer his, imprisoned in a mind that he can no longer control, he is a slave to the world, surrounded by child-people at the North Pole who claim to be hundreds of years old and may or may not have sex lives even though, by all appearances, they are children (Judy, played by 9-year-old actress Paige Tamada, assumes Scott is hitting on her and tells him that she's "seeing someone in wrapping," although there's also a Denny's waitress named Judy, leading to a misunderstanding involving Scott's relationship to whichever Judy which includes sexual undertones). The least terrible of these North Pole immortals is Bernard (David Krumholtz), who has the regrettable duty of informing whatever new sad-sack gets dragged into this hellish Faustian bargain that all their hopes and dreams are dead and they now have to be Santa Claus, but even Bernard goes an pulls a dick move like giving Scott's bratty entitled kid Charlie a magic snowglobe that forcibly beckons Santa Scott every time Charlie shakes it. Imagine that you can't even rely on that sweet ten minutes a day where you can reasonably excuse yourself from dealing with your godawful children to lock yourself in the bathroom and take a dump, because your co-worker gave your shitty kid a magic frickin' snowglobe. Throw in a third-act sequence of pre-9/11 police station terrorism where a bunch of smug-ass kids dressed like they just came from sanitation workers summer camp and calling themselves "elves with attitude" (oh, for the love of...) break Santa Scott out of jail, tie-up and torture a cop before gagging him with a donut, and we have the makings of yet another holiday family classic. This is why western civilization is declining.
