Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Alas, poor Kylo! I knew him ...

Grade: B –

Director: Rian Johnson

Starring: Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Kelly Marie Tran, Laura Dern, and Benicio del Toro

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 32 min.

The deepest emotional resonance in Star Wars: The Last Jedi occurs during companion scenes in which Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) engages with Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher). The first features the playback of an iconic hologram once sent by a young princess and freedom fighter, the second being a face-to-face farewell between aging siblings, warriors, and cultural touchstones. If anyone was expecting a truncated appearance by Leia in The Last Jedi following Fisher’s untimely death nearly a year ago, think again. She figures prominently throughout, but no longer as the damsel in distress from A New Hope or the love interest in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. She’s now a rightly revered leader who, after all, was already spearheading rebellion when Luke was still a farm boy and Han Solo a two-bit smuggler.

Leia’s earned stature aligns with a new gender dynamic being formed in this latest Stars Wars sequel trilogy. Women comprise the emerging vanguard—the spotlight shines brightest on Leia and Rey (Daisy Ridley), the new trilogy’s lead hero—while men equivocate, undercut, oppose, and even abuse. When Leia’s vice admiral (Laura Dern) temporarily assumes command of the rebel fleet, she’s immediately doubted and then targeted for mutiny by flyboy Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac). When Rey visits Luke’s island hideaway seeking the training and services of the aging Jedi to battle the First Order, a haggard Luke plays Hamlet, dithering and fretting over fears and old regrets. Luke, later visited by an virescent old master, accurately casts the legacy of the (notably patriarchal) Jedi Order as one of failure. Rey is later taken before Supreme Commander Snoke, leader of the First Order and master of Ben Solo, aka Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), where Snoke growls “give me everything” before prostrating and mentally raping her.

It’s a pity that this more woke Star Wars is saddled by a slipshod storyline and scant sense of discovery that’s previously propelled the saga. While the nostalgia is strong in this one, no enduring characters are introduced and precious little is learned about the existing ones—don’t expect much eye-opening info on Snoke’s identity, Rey’s parentage, or anything else you didn’t already know. Of the tri-headed plotline that fills the film’s opening half, one part is the equivalent of a low-speed car chase. Meanwhile, defrocked Stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega) and a new puckish partner (Kelly Marie Tran) embark on a related mission that ultimately matters not a whit. They detour to a planet with an opulent casino frequented by upscale arms dealers—the latest update of the Mos Eisley cantina—who’ve made a killing selling to both sides of the galactic war and off the toil of enslaved children. But writer-director Rian Johnson doesn’t spend much time on this populist and anti-colonialism subplot, instead racing away in the blur of a CGI stampede.

Remember how Luke’s Jedi training on a distant locale and his later attempts to turn an evil contemporary away from the dark side of the Force were spread over two movies? Well, Johnson crams the same story arc for Rey into ninety minutes, including a reprise of the Dagobah evil cave sequence that reveals nothing besides Johnson’s affinity for the hall of mirrors scene in The Lady from Shanghai. A burgeoning connection between Rey and Ben carries the promise of gleaning gradations in the Force atwixt its light versus dark extremes. But that, too, evaporates once the characters, and with them the narrative, retreat to their familiar camps in time for a climactic confrontation featuring yet another assault on another rebel compound.

The Last Jedi subsists on its iconography, including ragtag rebels who intone about igniting “the spark that will light the fire” of rebellion, a variant of the same mantra we’ve heard in every previous Star Wars film. The Last Jedi flirts with hope and change, but it’s mostly sound, fury, and force signifying little.

When The Game Stands Tall

The Passion of the Coach

Grade: C +

Director: Thomas Carter

Starring: Jim Caviezel, Alexander Ludwig, Michael Chiklis, Laura Dern, Clancy Brown, Stephan James and Matthew Daddario

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hr. 55 min.

Perseverance in the face of adversity is very much a relative virtue. An aging baseball player trying reach a career milestone isn’t close to the same level as a soldier at war trying to stay alive. But each person overcome their own obstacles and show mettle individualized to their situation.

But then there’s When The Game Stands Tall, which tells the immediate before-and-after of the Sept. 2004 end to Da La Salle High School football program’s real-life, record-setting 151-game winning streak. There are formidable reasons precipitating the loss, including an off-season health scare suffered by legendary head coach Bob Ladouceur (Jim Caviezel, still channeling Jesus) and the murder of former star teammate Terrence Kelly (Stephan James) less than a month earlier, days before Kelly was set to enter the University of Oregon on a football scholarship.

But ultimately, this is the story of a California football program that doesn’t lose a game for 12 years suddenly coping with something every other team in sports history faces all the time. And once Da La Salle loses (gasp) TWO games, this otherwise pedestrian tale of uplift crosses an uncomfortable line when a tour through a VA hospital is used as the springboard for the team to bond and start winning again.

Adapted by writer Neil Hayes from his book of the same name, director Thomas Carter (“Coach Carter”) weaves in the requisite genre tropes, including the star running back (Alexander Ludwig) and overbearing dad (Clancy Brown), the saintly coach and his long-suffering wife (Laura Dern), the comic assistant coach (Michael Chiklis), the egotistical star player, and a pivotal game against an all-African-American behemoth.

As far as high school football movies go, When The Game Stands Tall is more Friday Night Lite.

The Master

I'm Still Here...

Grade: B

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Laura Dern, Ambyr Childers and Jesse Plemons

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 17 min.

Of all the influences on Paul Thomas Anderson’s post-World War II American saga The Master, the life and times of L. Ron Hubbard ranks no higher than Upton Sinclair’s Oil! and tycoon Edward L. Doheny did on There Will Be Blood. While Anderson acknowledges using Hubbard as an inspiration for Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a shaman-cum-charlatan heading an Eisenhower-era spiritual movement called “The Cause,” don’t expect a roman à clef chronicling the birth and belief system of Scientology.

The Master’s central focus isn’t even the nature of personality cults, as in Martha Marcy May Marlene, though that’s certainly one of many undercurrents to this enigmatic epic. Instead, Anderson returns to familiar themes found throughout his short but resplendent filmography: the search for a father figure or lost son; dysfunctional family relationships; and flawed men fated to self-destruction.

The biggest surprise, however, is that The Master isn’t really Dodd’s story—indeed, the film’s title is a misnomer, referring not simply to Dodd but rather those things in everyone’s lives that preoccupy or even control them. Rather, the real protagonist is Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a sailor stationed in the Pacific Theater who spends his R-and-R humping anatomical sand castles and masturbating in the surf. Returning stateside and suffering from some unspecified emotional disorder, the dissipated Freddie’s only real passion is mixing bootleg liquor using darkroom chemicals, paint thinner, cleaning supplies and anything else at his disposal. When he loses a job as a department store portrait photographer fighting one of his many coifed, well-heeled subjects, he lashes out at an ideal he knows he’ll never appreciate or attain. After he’s chased away from work as a Steinbeck-ian cabbage picker, Freddie winds up a stowaway aboard a yacht being chartered by Dodd and a handful of his followers.

Dodd takes in the brutish Freddie, whom he likens to a fearful animal that eats its own excrement. However, it’s never clear whether the Master’s motives are altruistic, opportunistic or even sexual. Through a system of “processing”—undoubtedly modeled after Scientology’s “auditing”—Dodd seeks to exorcise Freddie’s demons and assimilate him into the fold.

Encased in atmospheric amber, The Master emulates the pace and palette of There Will Be Blood—if you splice Jonny Greenwood’s score for both, you couldn’t tell where one ends and the other begins. Although Blood is 20 minutes longer, theater viewers may exit The Master believing the opposite to be true. However, while Anderson’s oil epic was a character-driven allegory about Americanism and religion, the writer-director came to his newest project full of big ideas but became both enamored and distracted by his formidable actors along way.

Phoenix, appearing in his first film since the underappreciated I’m Still Here, gives an engrossing, awards-worthy performance. He compresses Freddie’s morass of rage, insecurity and anti-social behavior behind an inarticulate mumble, frozen sneer and graceless gait, a vessel that sometimes appears only vaguely human. Dodd—who describes himself as “a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher”—leans on charm and polish to peddle his mix of mysticism, science fiction and dime store psychology. But, he’s most revealing when Hoffman flashes an anxiety and anger simmering just below his well-scrubbed facade, such as when a naysayer challenges his dogma at a dinner party or a benefactor (Laura Dern) frets over a word change to a processing question made in Dodd’s second tome—through Hoffman, Dodd responds to this incident with irritation tinged with a vague surprise that anyone would notice, much less brood over such vagaries.

Together, Dodd and Freddie are two sides of the same animalistic coin—a scene in which they meet, physically and emotionally, in the middle of conjoining jail cells is unforgettable. Still, there’s only so many ways to (re)make this point. Anderson doesn’t pivot away from his two leads long enough to fully develop the many underwritten supporting characters, including Dodd’s biological son (Jesse Plemons) and daughter (Ambyr Childers), and his son-in-law (Rami Malek). Amy Adams is terrific as Peggy, Dodd’s wife, the power behind the throne who is part feminine ideal, part Lady Macbeth, but her performance becomes frustratingly one-note the more it plays second fiddle to Hoffman and Phoenix.

As a result, narrative opportunities are squandered. When the police show up to arrest Dodd, Anderson not only leaves viewers to assume Dodd is guilty of an unexplained financial grievance, he also wastes screen time show Freddie yet again fight someone (this time cops) that could have been used to elaborate on big ideas like a historical intolerance, sometimes hostility, by the government towards nontraditional faiths in a country that promises freedom of religion.

The one question The Master does lucidly pose is whether reforming the personality of a lout like Freddie is possible or even prudent. In so doing, Anderson—an avowed Stanley Kubrick devotee who reportedly filmed portions of The Master using the actual 65mm camera used to shoot 2001—has made his version of A Clockwork Orange. It’s a comparison underscored by such scenes as a dinner party in which Freddie visualizes all the ladies in attendance naked, and a final shot that I half expected to be accompanied by a voice over proclaiming, “I was cured all right.”

In one of the film’s more tedious montages, Dodd assigns Freddie an “application” that involves walking back and forth across a well-furnished room and finding different ways each time to describe the wood wall and windowpane he touches on either side. It’s an exercise not unlike watching The Master, a handsome canvas that’s open to interpretation, not explication.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

Everything Must Go

That Deangelo-Office stint didn't go so well

Grade: B

Director: Dan Rush

Starring: Will Ferrell, Rebecca Hall, Laura Dern, Michael Pena, Stephen Root, and Christopher Jordan Wallace

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 36 min.

The first five minutes of Everything Must Go are very bad for Nick Halsey (Will Ferrell). He gets fired from the company he’s worked at for 16 years, has his car repossessed, and returns to his suburban Phoenix, Az. home to find that his wife has left him, but not before strewing his belonging across the front yard, changing the locks to the house, freezing their bank accounts, and cancelling Nick’s cell phone service.

Alone and adrift, Nick settles into the recliner situated on his lawn and, with a fridge full of Pabst Blue Ribbon, imbibes the alcoholism that caused this adversity in the first place. City ordinances and complaining neighbors soon convert camping outside into a yard sale, an obvious metaphor for Nick finally unloading his past. Vinyl records recall memories of Nick’s drunk, deejay dad; a yearbook reminds him of an old classmate (Laura Dern) he decides to visit; a projector allows him to revisit old home movies.

We learn more about both Nick’s flaws and dormant heart thanks to two strangers who wander into his orbit. In an example of art imitating life, a terrific Christopher Jordan Wallace, the 14-year-old son of slain rapper Notorious B.I.G., plays a fatherless youngster who mirrors Nick’s expressionless melancholy as he bikes throughout the neighborhood looking for someone to just teach him how to play baseball.

And, across the street is a new pregnant neighbor, Samantha (Rebecca Hall), whose absent career husband portends a woman experiencing the same early woes that eventually plagued Nick’s wife (whom we wisely never see).

Directed and adapted by Dan Rush from a Raymond Carver short story, Everything Must Go is at times too minimalist for its own good, and the storyline progresses to a predictable end despite its the semi-surreal setup.

But, the film works on two particular levels. First, it is an earnest fable about a man who must confront and let go of his past in order to embark on a better future. Ferrell dials back his normal oafish shtick in favor of the low-key humorous persona he used in Stranger Than Fiction.

Second, there’s a commentary about the artificiality of suburbia, in which denizens suffer the same problems as everyone else but craft covenants and regulations intended to wall away life’s ugliness, even the peculiarity of a man living with his own stuff on his own lawn. Everything bad, indiscreet, or just unusual must go…out of sight and mind.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at Indyweek.com - http://goo.gl/UdY4t