Solo: A Star Wars Story review

There are usually two types of “Star Wars” fans; the people who watch it for Darth Vader and the people who watch it for Han Solo. Nobody watches for Luke Skywalker (Sorry-not-sorry). Because we already have two trilogies essentially devoted to the rise and fall of Darth Vader, it was almost a foregone conclusion that someone would build a story around the cocky flyboy turned space outlaw originally played by Harrison Ford. Ron Howard, who previously worked with George Lucas on the 1988 fantasy film “Willow,” directs “Solo: A Star Wars Story, “a tangential prequel that helps fill the gaps between the larger sagas, primarily focusing on Han as a youthful runaway.

Father and son writers Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan begin this movie showing Han (Alden Ehrenreich) escaping an enemy occupied planet without his lover Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke). Proclaiming that he will one day return to save her, Han assumed the moniker Solo and joined the Imperial military to steal something large enough to buy a ship and return to his girl. There he meets up with a group of competing smugglers led by the cynical Beckett (Woody Harrelson). After joining, he makes a deal to help the group steal a volatile weapons payload for a dangerous arms dealer named Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany).

 As the film progresses, we get to see the young Solo’s first encounters with the Millennial Falcon, the vein gambler Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), and his destined lifelong partner Chewbacca. We should expect the character’s greatest hits and catchphrases within this style of conceptual universe building, but it also smells a lot like fan-service, and as each of these moments pass, you can almost hear Kasdan’s red pencil drag a line through the list of directives ordered down from Mount Disney. That’s why I felt slightly guilty by the big grin that came over my face as the movie plopped these elements into the story like farmer filling the trough for his hungry pigs. I’ll be the first to admit that even as I acknowledge the pandering here, I enjoyed almost all of it.

Howard handles the sci-fi/western themes and the action sequences well. Hints of Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” and the cult television series “Firefly” feel present here, even as those properties wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the influence of “Star Wars” in the first place—a classic example of the pop culture snake eating its tropes.  Handheld shaky cam obscures some of the ground combat, and the runtime feels about 15 minutes too long, but any motion picture that gives us a train heist, a prison escape and an aerial dogfight all within the same theater experience at least has a good understanding of what populist filmmaking should be.

Is “Solo: A Star Wars Story” essentially Star Wars fan fiction? Yes, but that doesn’t automatically make it bad, even if it doesn’t move the needle very far within the overall mythology. Ehrenreich carries everything adequately, even if his boyish take on the character isn't the spot-on Harrison Ford impression people are expecting. The supporting cast is all given enough to do to keep us invested in their place within the story as well.  There’s almost nothing that’s essential or impactful about this franchise mortar of a movie, but it’s highly entertaining and full of characters (new and old) that we want to spend our time with, which is more than I can for almost half of the other entries in the Star Wars cinematic universe.

Grade: B

Originally published in Idaho State Journal/June-2018

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri review

Writer, director, and playwright Martin McDonagh has reached new heights and new ambitions with his latest effort “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri.” This is a strangely American story for the Irish filmmaker; a dark, rural noir about a community plagued by tragedy and bitter rivalries. The film’s dark sense of humor and colorful dialogue, as well as actress Frances McDormand as the lead, brings to mind bleaker work of the Coen brothers, and while “Three Billboards” isn’t quite as structurally sound or tonally confident as something like “Blood Simple” or “Fargo,” this Midwest murder ballad has its own eccentricities to boast.

 McDormand stars as Mildred Hayes, a hardened town’s woman who is still in mourning after a year of waiting for the local police to solve the sexual assault and brutal murder of her teenage daughter. When it seems like the local authorities have exhausted all their leads and have let the case get cold, Mildred takes action by renting three un-used billboards on an old highway, calling out the police chief Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) for his inaction. Sam Rockwell plays Jason Dixon, the hot-headed officer who works under Willoughby and whose reputation as an underachiever places him in a conflicting position between the locals, the vengeful Mildred, and his boss.

Speaking only for his cinematic work, McDonagh is one of the many filmmakers who graduated from the school of post-Tarantino, making bratty, self-conscious and genre-defying crime movies. In this regard, he shares a lot of same obsessions as his British crime comrades such as Matthew Vaughn (“Layer Cake”) and Guy Ritchie (“Snatch”), but where he departs from all of these influence, is his ability to be arch and ultra-violent while never losing sight of his interest in deep-rooted emotional storytelling. His debut “In Bruges” as well as “Three Billboards…” lets the flashy style and sassy dialogue carry us to unexpected tenderness flowing beneath the surface of his movies’ genre appeal. This latest work pushes the sincerity of its lurid subject matter even further and finds McDonagh dialing into his actors’ performances with more clarity and a new sense of Zen confidence. This is why it's all the more frustrating when the movie undercuts its emotional core with corny punchlines or crass jokes.

The majority of the film balances the dark humor and the darker tragedy with commendable grace and agility, but occasionally when these two tones run into each other, they loudly clang. “Game of Thrones” actor Peter Dinklage is essentially included in the cast for the sole purpose of delivering an extended little-person joke, and both Harrelson as Chief Willoughby and John Hawkes as Mildred’s abusive ex-husband are both sporting young trophy wives played by Abbie Cornish and Samara Weaving; a strange parallel that isn’t addressed and is often played for tonally-inappropriate laughs. Though McDonagh is stretching his abilities here and has perhaps made his most fulfilling and ambitious movie yet, the stretch-marks are definitely visible.

“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri” isn’t a perfect film but it’s a welcome surprise during the usually-stuffy prestige season. It’s a twisting crime yarn that you can never predict and that’s equally concerned with presenting the film as both an art-form as well as a means for populist entertainment. This is the director’s best-looking film to date, with cinematographer Ben Davis capturing the landscape in a way that informs the movie’s southern-gothic undertones perfectly. And yet, even with a bigger canvas being utilized, the performances never drift too far from the intimate relationship they successfully build with the audience.

Grade: B+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2017

Listen to this episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Three Billboards..."

Out of the Furnace review

               The characters in Scott Cooper’s “Out of the Furnace” have everything working against them. They’re under paid, they’re incarcerated, they’re deep in debt, they have cancer, and worst of all, they are they are living in the genre confines of a bleak rural noir. Like 2010’s “Winters Bone” or even this year’s “Prisoners”, crime and revenge has bled from the urban streets into the red-neck hills, where the consequences of human betrayal are met with even more brutality.

                Cooper’s follow up to his country music character-study “Crazy Heart” is quite a departure in style.  Even though the understated quietness of his scenery and the subtle direction of his actors are still intact, this movie moves away from the tangible warmth of the county-western bars and plunges deep into a dower underworld of drugs and murder. While Cooper philosophizes on America’s post Iraq psychology and the economic weight burdened on blue-collar culture, when the plot finally kicks into gear , his film settles confidently into its base interests as a nail-biting, pulp thriller--and an occasionally brassy one at that.

                Christian Bale and Casey Affleck play Russell and Rodney Baze, two brothers who live  in a rust-belt, steel town, and who each have their own crosses to bare. Russell is sent to prison for 5 years after a drunk driving accident and Rodney is sent to war in Iraq, where he hopes to make some money for the family. When Russell is finally set free, he finds his girl (Zoe Saldana) remarried and his brother is forced to lose bare-knuckle boxing matches to pay off his ever growing debt with a local drug syndicate. After Rodney goes missing and the cops are tied-up by jurisdiction to move forward with the case, Russell decides to investigate the rotted underbelly of this dangerous world himself.

                 “Out of the Furnace” isn’t nearly as profound or as A-level as it thinks it is, but the sincerity of the performances and a seat clenching third-act saves it from being an unrelenting downer.  Bale and lil’ Affleck are both effective without overplaying things and their instincts are tuned well enough know which note to play each scene.  Side performances from Willem Dafoe, Sam Shepard and the recently revived Forest Whitaker fill out their roles nicely as well. But it is Woody Harrelson as the tobacco stained, meth-head, hillbilly heavy, who drips with intimidating menace in every scene he steals.

                While spending the first half of the film stacking conflict on top of complication against the protagonists, the story feels a bit loose and shaggy, and slow to get going. But when the pawns have been put into place the despair truck is finally done unloading, all of this character work pays off in an old fashion man-hunt.  The violence is treated just a blunt as the emotions are approached with tenderness and the mechanics of the cat and mouse set-piece’s between Bale and Harrelson and genuinely exciting and unpredictable. 

                If you can wade through the woe-is-me grunge in all of it, there’s a half-way decent revenge movie to enjoy in here. I can’t say Cooper gives us anything we haven’t seen somewhere else done better—“No County For Old Men” and the Aussie gangster film  “Animal Kingdom” comes to mind—but sometimes when you get a respectable director and talented cast together you can end up with something pretty watchable.

Grade: B -

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2013