Everything You've Heard About Me Is True

Year: 2018

Director: Ron Howard

Cast: Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke 

Run Time: 2 hours 15 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Before we dive in, I want to say a few words. As we can obviously see from the example Marvel is setting, maybe franchise fatigue just doesn't exist anymore, but I think we should remove that argument from the table completely anyway. Disney might be cravenly pumping out sequels in the MCU and the Star Wars universe, but the fact that somehow Hollywood has decided to turn two redheaded stepchild genres (superheroes and science fiction) into massive blockbuster tentpoles every six months or so is not a bad thing. We're living in an unprecedented time for effects spectacle filmmaking and we are very lucky we get to have what we have. That said, Solo: A Star Wars Story kinda sucks, but that's definitely not because I'm fatigued with the genre. It just happens to suck.

It's OK, it happens to the best of us.

So, have you ever wondered why Han's last name is Solo? (The real question is have you ever wondered why any character has a last name?) Have you ever wondered how Chewie got his nickname? (Again, this shouldn't really be a concern; this is how nicknames work) Have you ever wondered why Billy Dee Williams can't pronounce "Han"? (Honestly, I think this one might be the actual reason the movie exists. Rogue One was made to clear that plot hole about the Death Star having such a lame weak point, so maybe each of these Star Wars Stories will just be taking a caulk gun to every plot hole in the franchise)

Well, you'll get the answer to all these questions and about twenty million more in Solo: A Star Wars Story. We follow young Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) as he escapes from the planet of Dickensian orphans he was born on, unfortunately having to leave his girlfriend Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke) behind. He joins the army with an aim toward eventually earning enough to buy a ship and come back to save her. While he's away and she's not onscreen, he has the opportunity to pretend they actually had chemistry.

Anyway, he falls in with rogue bandit Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson) and gets involved in a chain of double-crossing criminal syndicates to pull off a major heist with the help of Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), and the equal rights activist droid L3-37 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge).

This makes even less sense in practice than on paper, but she's still the best character in the movie.

To be completely honest, the one reason I was even remotely interested in watching this movie in the first place was Alden Ehrenreich. Although he certainly doesn't need help getting noticed considering that he made his feature film debut in a Francis Ford Coppola movie (granted, it was Tetro, but still), his true star-making role was in the Coen Brothers' Hail, Caesar!. That movie was barely a movie, rather a series of disjointed shards of humor, but he stole each and every one of those shards like he was in an Ocean's movie, owning the screen for every millisecond he was on it.

Unfortunately, such is the soul-sucking power of Solo that not even Ehrenreich could do anything with the Everest of a role he was handed. He's still charming and does more with it than probably any other actor his age could have (consider Valerian, in which Dane DeHaan was given a very similar role to much lesser effect), but this Solo as written barely resembles the person we met at the beginning of Star Wars, and forty years of nostalgia mixed with the general magnetism of young Harrison Ford just can't be captured by an impression, however solid it may be. And it's not like I'm even a huge fan of the character, so I'm not being precious about his arc or consistency or whatever. But forcing poor Ehrenreich to imitate a well-known badass outlaw while reading the lines of a Skywalkerian young dreamer just doesn't get results.

That hair is still working for me, though.

Unfortunately, nobody else seizes their opportunity to steal this movie. Everyone is completely functional in their roles, but there's not a standout among them, not even Donald Glover, who is perfectly fine in his interpretation of Lando's bluster and bravado, but not exactly blowing the roof off. And Emilia Clarke is just inches away from slipping completely into the background.

Everyone and everything is burdened with a script that is abjectly terrible, with scenes falling into place with sickeningly predictable thuds, obliterating subtlety along the way. In addition to committing the worst sin of soft sci-fi (the Aaron Sorkin-esque dialogue the Star Trek movies indulge in so much, in which an entire soliloquy of gleep-glop spacebabble gets split up between five people as if they're having a conversation instead of just reading a paragraph directly from Wookiepedia), this script pulls in an alarming number of hackneyed crime thriller tropes ("If you get into this life, you're in it for good.")

There's not an ounce of finesse to be found. The exposition sprays in every direction like shrapnel, the plot beats and double crossings are hampered by the film's limited scope, and for a movie that's primarily concerned with explaining every single element of Han Solo's character - from his name to his gun to the way he ties his shoes - it opens up an abundance of plot holes that make the whole affair intensely confusing in addition to being infuriatingly stupid.

Another of my favorite bad movie tropes is present in spades: Han does something kind of simple and unimpressive and other characters feel the need to comment, "Wow, what a great pilot this kid is!"

Now, there are some good things about this movie. The goofy character design of the Star Wars universe is continued with gusto here, including an awesome old lady space worm and some sort of robot creature that drips orange goo from his mouth pipes. I will always appreciate any movie that embraces the kiddie matinee quality of these films, and there is one terrific action setpiece involving a magnetic train that feels the appropriate amount of popcorn-munching fun. And maybe the most important thing: this is probably the closest we'll get to an acknowledgement that Chewbacca's son Lumpy from The Star Wars Holiday Special is canon.

Justice for Lumpy!

Really, the worst of Solo is just how mediocre it is (the only wholly terrible thing is the choir of children who burst in on the score from time to time). Even the much storied Kessel run is a jumbled, overstuffed waste of time when it so clearly should have been a sleek, bad-ass race through a meteor field. At every opportunity, Solo takes the safest, blandest route, never pushing itself to do anything but gently nod at Star Wars fans, saying "You know how there was dice before? Here's the dice. Do you see the dice? Make sure you notice the dice. Didn't we do a great job?" I'd warn you away from seeing it in theaters, but judging from that Memorial Day weekend box office pull, that's not something I should be worried about.

TL;DR: Solo: A Star Wars Story is a bland film that is corrosively devoted to explaining every last detail of the previous Star Wars movies.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1238
Reviews In This Series
Star Wars (Lucas, 1977)
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (Kershner, 1980)
Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (Marquand, 1983)
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (Abrams, 2015)
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Edwards, 2016)
Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (Johnson, 2017)
Solo: A Star Wars Story (Howard, 2018)

Tour De Frances

Year: 2017

Director: Martin McDonagh

Cast: Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell

Run Time: 1 hour 55 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I had been resisting watching Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, which has been probably the most violently divisive entry in the awards bait canon in a year that's rumbling with controversy. But after it won the Golden Globe, I felt obligated to weigh in, so here are my way-too-late thoughts on the project. Strap in folks, it's gonna be a bumpy ride.

Why couldn't The Greatest Showman have won, so I could just review that again?

So, here's the plot. It's been seven months since Mildred Hayes' (Frances McDormand) daughter was raped and murdered. Still struggling with how to handle the loss and find closure in the case, she rents out three billboards on the road leading into town blaming the police - and especially the beloved Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson), who is struggling with cancer - for not making any headway. This stirs up a lot of backlash from the town and creates a firestorm of conversation and controversy.

Policeman Jason Dixon (Sam Rockwell) - that's literally his name, I don't know what to tell you - is already prone to violent rages so this doesn't bode well for the town's spirit in general. But she also gets different degrees of support and blowback from her grieving son Robbie (Lucas Hedges, who is there with bells on if you have a part in an Oscarbait movie where he gets to do an accent), the "town midget" James (Peter Dinklage), and her abusive ex-husband Charlie (John Hawkes), who is now living with his 19-year-old girlfriend Penelope (Samara Weaving). Mildred meets the blowback of the town with endless tough-mother posturing and kicking dudes in the balls.

Imagine this picture times thirty and you pretty much get it.

It's very tempting to approach this film from a moral perspective instead of a critical one, which has become ever-so common in today's online film culture. And while I would never argue that the faults of the characters (their use of offensive, outdated terms, for one thing) are faults of the movie, Three Billboards is necessarily about the muddiness of morality and redemption. It invites us to consider the morality of these characters as the story's prime currency, and that invitation leaves it vulnerable because those themes are clunky and entirely mishandled.

For one thing, this is a story about sexual assault and violence against women that was written by a man. For another thing, this is a story about racial injustice and police violence that was written by a white man. For a-f**king-nother thing, this is a story where Woody Harrelson's wife is played by a woman who's 21 years younger than him and is forced to stumble through a line about how great his penis is.

And to be frank, a white man writing this story isn't necessarily a liability. It just shouldn't be this white man. Martin McDonagh somehow manages to write a script with a central thesis on racial injustice that features three black characters with speaking roles in a cast of dozens, and two of those speaking roles have fewer words than your average cough drop wrapper. And the foregrounded statements about women fighting against assault are couched in an endlessly repetitive litany of scenes of McDormand dishing out cartoon violence with impunity. It swivels from being gritty and violent to quippy and light in lurching, uneven motions, and never manages to stretch a consistent tone over more than ten minutes at a time.

The one scene where she doesn't have her fist planted firmly up a man's ass.

The plot is messy and irritating, even though the script does find its moments to shine when the humor is isolated enough from the drama to not feel so maudlin and strained. But the actors living out that plot are pretty uniformly terrific. Frances McDormand has already been more than recognized for her work here, but she really is superb, embodying her role in a very physical, top-down performance that doesn't skimp on the little gestures and details. She even redeems some of the dumb mama grizzly scenes, peeling back layer upon layer of the character that isn't present on the page.

Sam Rockwell is doing fine work here too, especially in his most comic dopey moments, but his character is a little too off the rails of actual human behavior that he is forced to fall back on the marble-mouthed mumbling that most actors do when they want to be tough in movies set in the South. Then there's Harrelson and Dinklage being exactly as good as you'd expect (but not much more).

But honestly, if I was in charge of handing out the awards, I'd make sure not to overlook Samara Weaving, who is straight-up brilliant in an unforgiving role, constantly approaching it at a sideways angle you wouldn't expect. She's the only consistently hilarious element of Three Billboards, and that's saying something for a movie that tries very hard to be hilarious.

It is my burden to be blessed with such good taste in actresses.

However, Martin McDonagh the writer is much more successful than Martin McDonagh the director (which is saying something). He mostly just sits back and lets his excellent cast work their magic, not attempting to do anything particularly interesting with the visuals. The man only really comes alive when it's time to shoot the titular billboards, which his camera swoops over and around with pornographic fervor every time they appear.

And thus does Three Billboards spill out across the screen in a tangled mess of misguided morality and wasted talent. I found it hard to hate, but it's too slapdash to recommend. The fact that it won the Golden Globe speaks to what an uneven slate of films we've been presented with this year more than anything else.

TL;DR: Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri is kind of a mess, but it really does boast some noteworthy performances.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1005

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

Year: 2014

Director: Francis Lawrence

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth, Julianne Moore

Run Time: 2 hours 3 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Well, that was unexpected.

No, not that Suzanne Collins' third Hunger Games book, Mockingjay was adapted into a film. That was inevitable, especially after The Hunger Games and Catching Fire nabbed the 7th and 6th highest opening weekends in box office history. Nor was it unexpected that they would split that film into two parts. Twilight and Harry Potter proved beyond all doubt that, despite the format's limitations, it's a surefire box office bonanza. What's unexpected is that Mockingjay - Part 1, an adaptation of the worst half of the worst of the three books, is kind of awesome.

And not just because of the Sexy Lumberjack District.

While the book itself was a bit of a snooze, Mockingjay - Part 1 brings its best elements (namely, the scenes of rebellion) to the forefront and reduces its worst (Katniss's endless emotional outbursts which ring true to a teen girl's responses to a traumatic situation, but murder the pacing in cold blood), both by nature of being a visual, rather than written medium. 

While this is done without any real technical distinction save for a few moments, this turns Mockingjay into an emotional barrage, perfect for capturing the tone of this film's shift in genre from its predecessors. Where The Hunger Games and Catching Fire were bleak and dystopian and child-murdery, they couldn't even hold a birthday candle to Mockingjay, which is nothing more and nothing less than a brutal war film.

So, yeah. This film picks up where the last left off. Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) was busy hungry gaming for the second time when she broke the game's force field and was whisked away to District 13 - a rebel safe haven long thought to have been abandoned. Ousted gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman in his final film role) has teamed up with District 13 President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) to rebrand Katniss as the Mockingjay, a symbol behind which the disparate districts can unite in opposition to the tyrannical Capitol, led by the despotic President Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland).

As Katniss explores the damaged districts with Gale (Liam Hemsworth), she battles her PTSD and harnesses her anger against the Capitol to inspire all of Panem. Although her goals are more singularly focused on the rescue of Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) from the Capitol's clutches, her words ignite the flames of war.

And the fervor of a thousand fanfictions.

As the skirmishes increase and the districts band together against the Capitol Peacekeepers, the film becomes a slamming gauntlet of war and civil unrest. Although it retains the violence-obscuring shaky cam of the earlier films, Mockingjay largely casts away the YA trappings of the franchise to depict a grown-up, mature vision of a reluctant teen crossing into adulthood and finally realizing her responsibility to do all she can to fight the injustices that she has grown up with.

Looking at the news this week, the increased sense of social responsibility present in Mockingjay hits hard. That's all I'm gonna say about that, but this film came at the right time to (albeit slightly accidentally) be bold and shatter political boundaries, much more than it could have even a couple months earlier.

Every element of the film emphasizes the hard facts of war and injustice. Especially notable is the costume design, which actively denies the actresses of their typical level of makeup, stripping away the cinematic facade of normalcy and highlighting the bleak, unpolished reality of the situation. Although Capitol fashionista Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) finds a way to make a military jumpsuit her own, her costume is perhaps the most affecting, transforming a gaudy glamor queen into a pale shadow of her former self.

Though Lord help me, she makes it work.

Behind those simple costumes lies the powerhouse of Mockingjay. Elizabeth Banks outdoes herself as the garish spokeswoman stripped down to her essentials and Jennifer Lawrence gives the single best performance of her career as a shattered teen girl scrabbling for a kernel of hope in a colorless world. The rest of the acting is competent all around (although Natalie Dormer as Cressida the propo director is perhaps a little showy), but these two women really bring the house down, quite literally in some cases.

This visual bleakness is accented in the score with a dazzlingly simple composition by James Newton Howard with lyrics pulled from the book itself - "The Hanging Tree." This song of rebellion spreads like wildfire from district to district, eventually being pulled into the underscore itself in one of the most well-composed sequences in the film.

Luckily, side characters like Banks and Woody Harrelson as Haymitch provide brief moments of levity to protect Mockingjay from becoming a grand tour of humanity's most awful tendencies. I mean, this is a film in which the opening title is led in with the line "I wish we were dead." It's tough to watch - whether it's the bombing or the shooting or the sneak attacks or the ruthless propaganda, there's something to hit everyone's disturbed sweet spot.

I spent a great deal of time dithering over my numerical rating for the film because it's so much better than Catching Fire, but it lacks the intangibles necessary for me to rate it a 9. The visuals just aren't spunky enough for me to look at it as an astounding piece of cinema - although as a series of emotional beatings, it's top notch. So take that 8 with a grain of salt, knowing that I'd give it a half if I could.

See you next year when we can finally lay this franchise to rest with maybe the best entry yet? Until then, may the odds be ever in your favor.

TL;DR: Mockingjay - Part 1 is the best film in the franchise so far - and a harrowing emotional journey.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 989

Reviews In This Series

Catching Fire (Lawrence, 2013)

Mockingjay - Part 1 (Lawrence, 2014)

Mockingjay - Part 2 (Lawrence, 2015)