January 2020 Round-Up – Part 1

Part 1 of my January Round-Up will focus on films I consider to be 2019 films despite seeing them in January 2020.

Honeyland(1/4/2019)

Honeyland is a documentary which follows a woman named Hatidze Muratova who lives in a remote section of Macedonia and keeps wild bees using traditional methods.  Muratova certainly lives a life I wouldn’t want, she’s out in the middle of nowhere in this frankly Borat-like section of the world without electricity or running water, but there is something kind of idyllic about the image and her bee-keeping techniques are interesting to watch.  The real conflict of the film comes when another family moves in next to her with seven kids and less of what you’d call a “connection to the land” and basically proceed to make Muratova’s life miserable while messing up the area for everyone.  The whole thing could be said to be a bit of an environmental parable given that it’s about irresponsible people ruining the land to everyone’s disadvantage, but the film does not necessarily vilify that family and does represent the pressures they’re under as well.  The film captures all this in a very “direct cinema” way which I sort of respect but on some level I might have actually wanted the filmmakers to step in on this one a little more to provide some more context as to where they found this lady and how they convinced her and her neighbor to let them film all of this as the filmmakers are a bit of a variable in this story that goes unaddressed.  I also wouldn’t have minded a bit more of an explanation in the film about just how much of a permanent effect that all of this would have on Muratova’s life and home.
***1/2 out of Five

 

Invisible Life(1/12/2020)

Invisible Life is a movie that was not really on my radar until it was announced that it hadn’t made the shortlist for the Academy Awards’ Best International Film category and a lot of people were really angry about that so when it came to town I figured I better make a point of catching it.  The film is based on a novel, which you can kind of tell, and follows a pair of sisters in 1950s Brazil.  In defiance of conventional birth-order conceptions the elder sister is a bit flighty and the younger sister is the responsible one, a fact which ends up changing both their lives when the elder sister runs out on the marriage that their father had arranged for her to marry a Greek sailor, leaving the younger sister to more or less take her place.  The elder sister returns to Rio and is shunned by the father, who lies and tells her the younger sister moved away and that she is never to return.  The two then spend years separated and not knowing the fate of the other.  The life stories that follow outline two forms of societal oppression.  The elder sister is forced to make her own way and experiences favela poverty and while the younger sister remains middle class she has her every hope and dream undercut by a lack of basic sex ed and family planning.  Beyond any political messaging the film tells a pretty engrossing yarn about two interesting people.  If there’s any weakness it’s probably that it never quite makes the life of the elder sister as interesting as the life of the younger sister after a certain point, also the movie has some really uncomfortable sex scenes which might take some audiences by surprise.  Outside of that it’s a pretty solid movie that I would generally recommend.
**** out of Five

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Little Women(12/31/2019)

If there’s any movie I’ve been kind of dreading this award season it was probably Greta Gerwig’s new adaptation of Little Women.  Not because I thought it would be “bad” by any means, it’s been critically acclaimed, has a stellar cast, and is the follow-up from the director of the movie Lady Bird which I liked quite a bit.  So I had little doubt it would be well crafted, but what really had me dreading it is that I worried it would be a movie that I wouldn’t really be in a position to analyze or talk about all that intelligently.  I’ve never read Louisa May Alcott’s novel of “Little Women.”  It wasn’t assigned to me in school and have never been enough of a “classics” buff to read it of my own volition.  I have seen a handful of its various film adaptations in passing and they’ve never done much for me and I even rewatched a couple of them in the last month in an attempt to get a better grasp of the story and the different ways to interpret them and they still didn’t really connect with me all that much.  It just seems like one of those public domain books that gets kind of mindlessly remade over and over again on the big and small screen without much alteration every single generation like the works of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.  But I certainly wasn’t going to skip something this big and talked about out of reviewer cowardice.

The film’s plot is largely unchanged from the story we’ve heard before.  The film is set in Concord, Massachusetts during the Civil War and a few years after and looks at a household where a mother (Laura Dern) is looking after her four daughters while her husband (Bob Odenkirk) is serving in the Union army.  Those daughters are the traditionalist Meg (Emma Watson), the tomboyish Jo (Saoirse Ronan), the shy Beth (Eliza Scanlen), and the troublemaker Amy (Florence Pugh).  The family isn’t poor exactly but it’s hardly rich and they do have more well off relatives like their snobby Aunt Josephine (Meryl Streep) and also live across the way from the estate of a wealthy man named Mr. Laurence (Chris Cooper), who is the guardian for his grandson Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) who comes to befriend the girls.  Love triangles ensue and the girls eventually grow up and grow apart but certain bonds can only be broken so far.

Of all the adaptations there have been of this novel the one with the longest legacy up to this point was probably George Cukor’s Academy Award nominated 1933 version.  That was not the first adaptation of the film (they’ve been remaking this since the silent era) but it was a major hit  even if it’s probably less famous for its Alcott reworking than for how it fit into a sort of culture war that was brewing in Hollywood at the time.  This was during the “pre-code” era and there was a lot of controversy at the time about the gangster movies and sex comedies coming out of the major studios at the time and this version of Little Women was being celebrated in certain circles as a conservative alternative that celebrated family values.  Elements like Jo’s tomboyishness were still there (she was being played by Katherine Hepburn after all) but at its heart it is still very much a family movie with an emphasis on wholesome sentimentality and to some degree that’s also the case with the 1949 version (which is pretty much only notable for being in color) and the 1994 version which is shockingly sincere and straightforward for something starring Winona Ryder in the mid-90s.  And that is more or less why I’ve never cared for these movies, they all kind of feel like they’ve all kind of felt like they exist to be played in middle school English classes and even when they depict tragedy they just feel kind of cloying.

Enter Greta Gerwig, who hasn’t made Little Women any less PG rated than her predecessors but has in many ways made the first adaptation of this thing that seems to be directed toward adult sensibilities.  The clearest alteration that Gerwig has made is that she took the chronological narrative from the book and adjusted it into something closer to a flashback structure.  The first scene is of Jo as an adult in New York working as a tutor while trying to get stories published and we also catch up with Amy in Paris, Meg dealing with her marital woes, and Beth having health problems.  It then flashes back to their youth and the movie cuts between the two timelines through the rest of the movie.  I’ve heard some reports of people finding this format confusing, and I may have benefited somewhat from seeing previous adaptations, but I thought it was pretty clear and also that the way this benefits the story more than outweigh any drawbacks.  For one, it really helps to define the personalities of these four sisters right up front by showing them when they’re more developed.  Previous adaptations struggled in this regard; they were able to make Jo’s differences clear enough with her tomboyish qualities but the other three sisters kind of blended together when they were just a bunch of children playing without extensive dialogue or internal monologue.  Additionally, knowing from the beginning where these characters end up kind of ups the stakes on the childhood sections, which could often feel a bit episodic and aimless in the other adaptations where you don’t have a clearer end goal.  And finally this allows those childhood flashbacks to feel more like pleasant memories than sappiness played straight and that somewhat plays into why I consider this adaptation to be more adult in its outlook than previous versions.

Needless to say there’s plenty that goes right here that has little to do with radical reinvention and everything to do with just getting certain things right.  It certainly doesn’t hurt that Gerwig has assembled an all-star cast of actors young and old.  Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, and Florence Pugh are a pretty unimpeachable trio to play the main sisters and Timothée Chalamet in many ways seems to have been born to one day play Laurie.  I will say that Laura Dern and Bob Odenkirk seem to struggle a little bit here, in part because they’re playing overly virtuous and altruistic characters who don’t fit as well in this slightly more cynical interpretation of the source material, but other actors playing adults here like Meryl Streep and Tracy Letts do work well here and add fun little diversions to the film.  Gerwig has also done a great job of making adjustments to the period detail that make things feel less stuffy without feeling overly anachronistic and Alexandre Desplat’s jaunty score really helps to make things flow well.  I also must say that even though the film is only fifteen to twenty minutes longer than any of the previous adaptations of the novel it sure feels like it has more breathing room which goes a long way toward making the story flow more naturally.

Now, I mentioned before that the 1933 Little Women was received as a conservative vision insomuch as it was family friendly so it is perhaps a bit of an irony that this latest version re-interprets the novel as something that was actually rather subversive, particularly in terms of how it viewed the role of women in its society.  Some extra lines are written into the film to underscore this which do kind of stand out and feel a touch on the nose but I don’t exactly begrudge the movie for.  I am a bit more on the fence about what the film does with its final moments in which (spoiler I guess) Jo is re-written to have become the author of a novel based on the lives of her sisters that is basically the novel “Little Women” (an idea the 1994 film also had) and a metatexual element takes over where a cigar comping publisher demands that this book be given the happy romantic ending that the real Louisa May Alcott was pressured into having, which then effects the final ending of the movie.  This feels a bit like an out of place attempt on Gerwig’s part to have her cake and eat it too given that nothing else in the movie up to this point is trying to be particularly meta.  On the other hand, that other ending legitimately does kind of suck and letting it play out sincerely like the other films do would not have been a satisfying end.  So, at the end of the day I think my worries about not being able to engage with an analyze this movie were for naught and in many ways it’s actually a lot better than I had even hoped.

****1/2 out of Five

Home Video Round-Up 12/22/2019

Men in Black: International (12/18/2019)
	There’s been a lot of talk of Disney’s dominance of the box office this year, and that’s certainly a real thing, but what they don’t talk about is the fact that this wasn’t just the result of Disney doing great but also the other studios shitting the bed with a lot of their own tentpoles.  Exhibit A in the underperformance of these other studios was probably Men in Black: International that didn’t so much bomb as much as it “came and went” in the most brutal fashion possible.  Honestly I was kind of surprised it didn’t work.  On paper it seemed like it was a reboot that was being done at the right time and in a good way so had assumed that it must have been a total stinker to fail like it did but having now seen it I’m not sure that’s really the case.  This movie isn’t awful at all… it’s just painfully mediocre, and painfully mediocre is usually good enough for the general public.  The leads have decent chemistry and there’s nothing wrong with the effects and while the story is predictable as hell (seriously, I predicted a major plot twist from the trailer), it’s not terrible.  But it’s not particularly good either.  I don’t think its jokes are very funny and the action scenes never rise above or sink below the level of competent.  Maybe the real cause of Disney’s dominance isn’t so much that it’s dominating the market so much as they’ve kind of risen the bar for the level of spectacle that people expect for their money and movies like this just can’t compete. **1/2 out of Five
The Biggest Little Farm (12/21/2019)
This documentary about a young couple who leave their urban lives to start a farm in Southern California became something of a sleeper hit early in the year and is among the highest grossing documentaries of the year but I’ve resisted seeing it for a while.  Frankly a couple of hippies finding purpose in growing organic lettuce or whatever is about the last thing I was inclined to be interested in, but I’ll admit that I was eventually won over by the movie.  For one thing, if I understood correctly one of the subjects was a professional camera operator before he decided to take up agriculture and you can sort of tell because this has a bit more of an eye for cinematic composition than you might expect and it’s been edited together and told more artfully than it could have been.  Also this farm they built really does seem different from your average farm given the sheer quantity of things they appear to be doing with it and it’s interesting seeing that come together.  The whole thing is a bit more self-congratulatory than it probably needed to be but considering how low my expectations were I’d say this was a pretty big win. ***1/2 out of Five
The Two Popes (12/21/2019)
	Fernando Meirelles’ City of God blew my mind when I saw it in high school.  Seeing that movie made me feel like I was seeing a major talent emerge in front of my eyes.  He followed that up with a pretty good movie in The Constant Gardener but after that his career completely fizzled and he kind of disappeared.  I feel like I should be a lot more excited that he’s finally made another relevant movie in The Two Popes but I kind of wasn’t.  What can I say; I just don’t find popes to be a huge source of interest.  There are kind of three movies going on here: there’s a lighthearted look at life in the upper echelons of the Catholic Church with a bunch of “pontiffs, they’re just like us” moments, then there’s a fairly serious biopic about the life of Pope Frances told through flashbacks, and then there’s a dialogue heavy movie about a sort of battle of respectful debate between two popes on different sides of certain theological debates.  Each of these three movies has some potential but I’m not sure they blend together all that perfectly.  They don’t completely cancel each other out but they don’t really build on each other either.  The performances are certainly great, both Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce were well cast and Pryce in particular really goes that extra mile to make himself look like the pope and pick up on his mannerisms and the film also seems to replicate the various Vatican locations faithfully.  The final movie is ultimately interesting and well made but it lacks a real vision and purpose. *** out of Five
David Crosby: Remember My Name (12/22/2019)
I’ve talked all year about how cookie cutter I tend to find biographical portrait documentaries, but there are ways to do it right and David Crosby: Remember My Name is one of the good ones.  The usual downfall of movies that follow old people around to celebrate their careers is how kiss-ass they tend to be, they’re usually hagiographies that exist to make their subjects smile when they see the final result.  That’s not a problem with this examination of the hippie singer-songwriter David Crosby in part because Crosby proves to be very open about his many faults and regrets.  It’s not a movie that ignores the high points in Crosby’s career and isn’t relentlessly negative but the highlights are almost certainly the portions where the singer talks about the depths of his drug addictions and about the ego driven conflicts that have resulted in Stills, Nash, and Young shunning him and refusing to so much as talk to him to this day.  It’s not the most artfully composed documentary but the whole thing could be described as rather confessional and it kept me interested even though I have very limited knowledge of the specific music that precipitated it.   If nothing else it blows that awful Echo in the Canyon documentary which also featured Crosby and seemingly had no interest whatsoever in interrogating the legacy of the milieu that he existed in. ***1/2 out of Five
Wild Rose (12/22/2019)
	This summer there were two competing British movies about unlikely music aficionados battling it out to be the “little movie that could” in the marketplace and neither of them really ended up taking off.  The first was the Bruce Springsteen love letter Blinded By the Light, which was a bit too loaded with coming of age clichés, and then there was this movie about a young Scottish girl with a troubled background who had unlikely dreams of becoming a country singer.  Jessie Buckley is quite strong in the lead role and while the movie isn’t trying for Ken Loach levels of social realism here they do manage to do a pretty good job of conveying the various issues in this woman’s life.  It’s the aspiring singer side of the movie that didn’t work as well for me.  I don’t know, I just don’t think the world needed a British country music 8 Mile right now.  Movies about breaking into the music industry are not that uncommon and the fact that this Scottish lass is trying to sing country music (and a form of country music that is not popular in Nashville right now to boot) did not really seem to be the right novelty to get me into this one and I’m not sure the movie ever really found the right ending either. *** out of Five

Uncut Gems(12/24/2019)

You know, as a critic I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to have a deep-seeded hatred at the sight of Adam Sandler’s face but I really don’t.  I mean, if I were a “real” film critic who had to see every single movie Hollywood puts out I probably would hate the guy, but his terrible comedies are generally pretty easy to avoid, especially now that they’re going direct to Netflix and aren’t getting major advertising campaigns.  In fact I don’t think I’ve seen any Adam Sandler produced movie in theaters at all since… I think 2002’s Mr. Deeds.  The Adam Sander movies I have actually kept seeing are the occasional non-comedic ones that he isn’t producing and which are using his on-screen persona in interesting ways.  Paul Thomas Anderson was the first serious director to use him for artistic ends in his 2004 film Punch Drunk Love and he’s also done good work in films like Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) and Judd Apatow’s Funny People.  Still these moments of Sandler clarity have untimely been pretty few and far between.  Hopefully that changes though because he’s gotten his best role yet in the new film from the Safdie Brothers called Uncut Gems.

In the film Sandler plays a sort of jeweler for the stars named Howard Ratner who I suspect he was inspired by Jacob Arabo.  Ratner owns a small storefront in the diamond district whose clientele appears to be invite only as his door is locked unless a potential buyer is buzzed in.  Howard also seems to have a lot of side hustles going on and appears to gable frequently.  One day in 2012 Kevin Garnett (played by himself) walks into Howard’s store on the eve of his conference semi-finals against the Philadelphia 76ers.  Ratner shows Garnett an uncut opal that he’d just acquired through nefarious means.  Garnett is immediately transfixed by it and wants to buy it on the spot but Howard has it set for auction and can’t sell.  Determined, Garnett asks that he simply be allowed to hold onto it as a good luck charm for that night’s game.  Ratner agrees, but only if Garnett leaves his championship ring as collateral.  Garnett agrees and Ratner immediately hatches a scheme: he’ll pawn Garnett’s ring while he’s gone and use that money to bet on Garnett that night and then use those potential winnings to pay off his gambling debts and then get the ring back before Garnett knows it was ever gone, but murphy’s law being what it is this isn’t going to be as easy as Ratner things and he’ll also need to deal with issues with his wife (Idina Menzel) and mistress (Julia Fox) while also being chased by angry loan shark enforcers.

Uncut Gems is the most high profile film yet to be directed by Josh and Benny Safdie, a directorial pair who made a bit of a splash with their films Heaven Knows What and Good Time, which were movies that never quite clicked with me but showed clear potential.  Uncut Gems to me shows that potential being realized.  The Safdies tell streetwise crime films set in the seedy parts of New York City that are supposedly disappearing.  Their previous movies looked at a drug addict and a bank robber and this one looks at someone who could be described as a hustler.  Howard Ratner is quite the creation; the very look of him with his goatee, leather jacket, and designer glasses frames communicates the kind of world he operates in and Sandler modulates his voice in a way to just make him sound like a bit of a weasel.  But unlike the protagonist of Good Time, who genuinely seemed like a menace to society, you don’t really hate Ratner.  Ratner doesn’t pose much of a threat to the average person, his compulsive gambling and wheeling and dealing mostly only poses a threat to himself and to the people who are foolish enough to go into not so legitimate business with him.

Much of the movie consists of Ratner running around the city trying to keep his various plates spinning, it’s kind of like a slowed down and movie length version of that section of Goodfellas where Henry Hill running a bunch of errands for the mafia while taking care of personal issues all while the FBI helicopters are swarming overhead.  But the Safdies aren’t Scorsese and they bring their own style to the proceedings.  Rather than fill their film with rock and roll cues they have this wild synth score in place and they have pretty modern cultural sensibilities.  The film is set in 2012, presumably to put it in a time when Kevin Garnett is still playing basketball, and they manage to make some appropriate soundtrack selections and make some cool casting choices like including a prominent cameo by The Weeknd.  You generally get the impression that these guys are plugged into what’s going on in the cooler sections of Manhattan and they bring it to the screen with exuberance.  You also get the sense that they understand a thing or two about gambling culture, which is what the film is ultimately about.  Ratner is plainly a gambling addict but this addiction is broader than just the risky bets he makes on sports, it extends to broadly to the various hustles we’re seeing him do through the whole movie.  He’s a character who frustrates the audience because he makes risky mistakes, but you can tell he isn’t frustrating himself with this behavior, in fact he seems to be thrilled by the rush of it all at least when he’s winning.  And to some extent so are we but we don’t need to worry about what happens when he loses.

****1/2 out of Five

December 2019 Round-Up

Queen & Slim(12/8/2019)

It feels like yesterday but apparently it was almost a decade ago when the name “Melina Matsoukas” first caught my attention when the music video for Rihanna’s “We Found Love” captured my attention and I felt compelled to look up who directed it and she has gone on to even bigger heights in that medium by directing some of Beyonce’s more viral music videos.  Now she’s finally made her feature film debut in the form of a sort of Thelma and Louise for the Black Lives Matter movement called Queen & Slim, which is about a couple who find themselves on the run after their first date is cut short by a police stop which ends with one of them having to shoot and kill said cop in self-defense.  On some level it’s easy to be impressed that this kind of movie even exists.  Selling a movie that sympathizes with cop killers probably isn’t easy regardless of how clearly they’re actions are justified but on another level I might have liked the movie to focus on the complexity of character who have to do that in a less clear-cut case of self-defense like in the aforementioned Thelma and Louise.  Beyond that I think the movie just has some tonal problems.  Aspects of it like the costumes the characters end up in and the car they end up driving harken back to the exploitation movies of the 70s but it isn’t really fun like those movies are and doesn’t have that sense of danger that they had.  It’s trying to be a more serious Black Lives Matter issue movie in its tone but I’m not sure it really makes a lot of terribly original or unique points about police violence in that regard.  I guess I wanted the movie to either be trashier or more realistic, but it instead takes a sort of middle route that doesn’t entirely work.  Still, I do think there’s going to be an audience for it that’s going to find catharsis in there simply being a movie that brings this sort of thing to the screen.
**1/2 out of Five

 

Richard Jewell(12/13/2019)

Richard Jewell tells the true story of a security guard who was working at a satellite event at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics when he found a bomb that had been planted and seemingly saved a lot of people by starting an evacuation but who then sort of had his life derailed when the FBI started to suspect that he planted the bomb himself in order to be a hero.  This project has been floating around Hollywood for a while now and at one point even had Jonah Hill and Leonardo Di Caprio attached to star and people like Paul Greengrass and David O. Russell being considered to direct.  It’s now being brought to screen in a slightly more scaled back form with the character actor Paul Walter Hauser starring and Clint Eastwood directing.  But having seen the film I really don’t get why so many people have thought that a movie about this story would be such a winner because I’ve got to say it’s really not that interesting of a story.  In the annals of people oppressed by the FBI Richard Jewell really isn’t very high on the list.  He was never put in jail, never arrested, and it seems like he never even had his career affected.  The full extent of his “oppression” was that he found himself in the center of a news cycle in which he was being reported as a suspect in the bombing (which he was) which no one remembers or cares about anymore.

Before the movie started there was a trailer for the movie Just Mercy which is about a guy who spent six years on death row based on a wildly unfair trial, compared to that this really doesn’t strike me as all that notable of an injustice.  This matters because the film really doesn’t have that much dramatic interest outside of its righteous anger about the Richard Jewell case.  The performances are generally quite good but I kind of hate what they did with Olivia Wilde’s character, who is depicted as a vapid bimbo motivated entirely by greed.  The criticism this film has received for depicting this real life journalist exchanging sex for a lead is entirely valid and even if (big “if”) this sort of thing could be forgiven as dramatic license in other movies it is an unworkable hypocrisy here given that this is supposed to be a movie about the evils of character assassination and of misrepresenting people and yet it’s doing exactly that with this woman.  Beyond that I guess there’s not a whole lot to say.  The movie certainly isn’t unwatchable, the dialogue is mostly good and the acting is fine, I guess I just fundamentally don’t see why this needed to be a feature film with this level of talent behind it.
**1/2 out of Five

 

Bombshell(12/21/2019)

Director Jay Roach has had a strange little career where he began as a maker of commercial star vehicle comedies like the Austin Powers movies and the Meet the Parents movies and then transitioned into making serviceable but not overly inspired political docudramas like Recount and Game Change for HBO but he’s had less luck bringing that side of his career to the big screen.  His most high profile political film for theaters is his latest film Bombshell, which details the sexual harassment scandal at Fox News and how it came to be national prominence before the advent of #MeToo.  Roach’s political movies have always been pretty effective at making famous people look and sound like political figures from the recent past and this is not really an exception.  Charlize Theron certainly looks a lot like Megyn Kelly (though I’m not sure she sounds quite right) and Nicole Kidman looks a lot like Gretchen Carlson and the film is generally populated by a strong cast of supporting players portraying other side personalities.  The film also seems to recreate the Fox Newsroom plausibly and the script is generally written with a requisite degree of wit and clarity.  People looking for another of Jay Roach’s HBO productions should be satisfied on that level, but this is a theatrical film and it never quite achieves that cinematic quality which would elevate it beyond that.

However, I think the bigger problem with this is that it’s a movie that requires its viewer to sympathize with Fox News anchors on some level and view them as remotely admirable people, and that is something that I don’t think I’m entirely capable of.  Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson are in fact terrible people.  They knowingly worked for and helped advance a propaganda outlet that has coarsened out political discourse and has spread untold chaos and suffering across the country.  Now let me be entirely clear, I am not in any way saying that this means they deserved to be sexually harassed, but there is something galling about people who spend their days advocating for hatred against people of color, immigrants, the LGBT community, and women who don’t work for Fox News suddenly deciding to care about this toxicity when it hurts them personally.  There are ways a movie about this topic could have reckoned with that that and found ways to explore this conflict, but this movie never really finds a way to do that and can’t really find a way to make these people feel like anything other than heroic whistleblowers.  If that doesn’t bother you, then this is a passable movie with reasonably good production values, but it does bother me.
**1/2 out of Five

 

The Cave(12/29/2019)

The Cave is one of two major documentaries from this year about the conflict in Syria, the other one being For Sama and having now seen both of them it’s difficult not to compare and contrast.  This one was directed by Feras Fayyad, who had previously directed Last Man in Aleppo, which focused on the “White Helmets” and this one looks at another group of humanitarians trying to do the best they can, namely a group of doctors working at the last remaining hospital in the city which is a makeshift operation in underground tunnels that can’t be as easily bombed.  The focus is on the hospital’s manager Amani Ballor who seems like a fairly impressive person.  It takes a while to get going but toward the second half it really starts to get dramatic and features some sad if exciting moments like when the hospital staff has to treat a bunch of people caught in a chemical weapon attack.  It’s generally more professionally made than For Sama but can get a little pretentious in its construction in the way that the personal For Sama does not.  On the other hand while both films have their rough moments For Sama has more graphic imagery in it so people sensitive about that sort of thing might be better served by The Cave.  Looking past the comparison though this is still a strong look at life during a modern war and it makes you really really mad at Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin.
*** out of Five

Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker(12/19/2019)

You know who I’m jealous of?  The 95% of the population who are going to go see Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker without having spent the last two years arguing about the merits of the last movie, Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi, on the internet.  This endless debate has been just a real bummer and has mostly consisted of people talking right past each other while making strawmen out of one another.  It’s been especially painful for me since I was among the people who didn’t like that movie which kind of put me at odds with both the critical consensus and in the rather awkward position of arguing against a movie for what I considered the right reasons while knowing there were a handful of people who were also arguing against it for the not so right reasons.  But I wasn’t going to just shut up and pretend there wasn’t a whole lot about that movie which bugged me and I ended up writing a three thousand three hundred word review of the damn thing which I think is to date the longest review I’ve ever written.  And now this whole debate is being rekindled all over again by the final film in this new Star Wars trilogy, which was directed by J.J. Abrams rather than Rian Johnson and which critics seem to be coming at it with knives out (pun intended) for perceived offenses against their preferred installment.  I’m going to do my best to discuss this thing without rehashing the old TLJ arguments all over again and I certainly don’t plan to set new length records.

We learn right from the film’s opening crawl that Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) has somehow resurrected and soon learn that he had created Snoke and was behind the resurgence of the Empire during this trilogy.  Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) has already found him and has begun to plot with him, but no one else knows where he is.  Meanwhile Rey (Daisy Ridley) has continued her Jedi training under Leia (Carrie Fisher) but then Poe (Oscar Isaac), Finn (John Boyega), and Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) arrive at the base with a lead suggesting that Palpatine is on an unknown planet called Exegol, a name that Rey recognizes from one of Luke Skywalker’s journals.  Knowing that The First Order is about to go on the offensive using a fleet of super star destroyers that will destroy the rebellion if they can’t find Palpatine and put an end to all of this.  As such Rey, Poe, Finn, Chewbacca, BB8, and C-3PO set out to recapture the trail that Luke was on to find this planet years ago.

If I had to sum up my objections to The Last Jedi it would be that it not only ignored mysteries that were deliberately set up in the first film but it dismissed them in the most disrespectful way possible.  It essentially told the fans they were stupid for having invested in ideas that J.J. Abrams had told them to invest in in the first place.  For instance, critics seemed to think there was a whole lot of interest to be mined from the fact that Rey’s parents weren’t prominent figures from earlier films, but to me that was just the most anti-climactic possible solution to a mystery from the first film.  There’s nothing new about force users coming from “nobodies,” hell, Anakin Skywaker himself came from “nowhere.”  So that wasn’t a radical reinvention so much as it was a lame “surprise” that didn’t fit within the original puzzle.  And now that he’s back in the director’s chair people are accusing J.J. Abrams of “capitulating” to the “bad fans” who dared not to like their precious Rian Johnson movie when the truth of the matter is that he was clearly just reverting back to the original vision he had when he made the widely popular The Force Awakens.  He also clears up a few other things that Johnson recklessly muddled like the origins of Snoke, Luke Skywalker’s reasons for having a bad attitude about training Rey, and the bad out of place comedy is kept to a minimum.

Of course there are still issues with this trilogy that this isn’t able to fix.  There’s still no explanation for why Rey was able to become a lightsaber savant without training and the basic logistics of how the First Order managed to take over the galaxy so quickly generally don’t make a lot of sense.  I would also say that the general trend of these movies mirroring installments of the original trilogy continues.  The Force Awakens was almost scene for scene similar to A New Hope, The Last Jedi very closely mirrored The Empire Strikes Back (despite critics’ insistence that it’s some sort of avant-garde reinvention), and the new film certainly has a lot in common with The Return of the Jedi though I’d argue not it’s not a ripoff to anywhere near the degree that The Force Awakens was.  Yes, the film has the Emperor and Lando but there isn’t really an equivalent to Jabba’s palace here and while the film does end in a big battle that’s intercut with a more personal conflict between Jedi something like that was probably inevitable regardless of who made this movie.  I would also say that the film is a little too drunk on slightly pandering cameos toward the end and I would also say that the movie isn’t entirely successful in building a performance out of Carrie Fisher stock footage to give Leia a meaningful role in the film.  That last issue was probably unavoidable to some extent but still the fact of the matter is that it’s pretty obvious what’s happening there and it’s not seamless.

But as easy as it is to pick holes in certain elements of the movie, but pros outweigh the cons in a pretty big way for me.  This is the first time we’ve really seen the cast of the new trilogy working together on a mission and the adventure elements here really delivered for me.  I’ve heard people say that the movie is “overstuffed” and moves too fast but to some extent that fast pace seems like an asset to me.  The characters find themselves on some visually interesting planets and there are some fairly solid action scenes along the way.  I also thought the film did a better job than I expected resolving the tensions between Rey and Kylo Ren, which I thought was kind of a mess by the end of The Last Jedi.  Beyond that I actually liked how hopeful and crowd pleasing the film’s finale was.  There’s nothing revolutionary about the way the last battle plays out but it certainly milks your desire to see win triumph over evil and as much as I might say they went a little overboard on some of the fan service I would be lying if I didn’t say I was struck when some of it happened.  It’s a kind of catharsis we from franchises like this in troubling times like these.

Honestly I’m not sure I’ve done a wonderful job of defending this movie, but I’m also kind of surprised that this is a movie that needs defending.  I can see why some people would be disappointed that this didn’t go off in whatever wild direction they thought The Last Jedi was pointing towards but isn’t that the same argument that was dismissed when people made it about The Last Jedi itself and its decision to ignore what The Force Awakens set up?  I heard one prominent Film Twitter personality accuse it of being “rude” to Rian Johnson as if Rian Johnson hadn’t been incredible rude to J.J. Abrams first.  And what’s really strange about the reception is that just about everything it’s been accused of things that are pretty in keeping with what The Force Awakens was doing, and last time I checked people liked The Force Awakens a lot.  I have the receipts; that movie is at 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and a solid 81 on Metacritic, if you liked that movie you should like this one or at least not be overly surprised that it is the way it is and the people claiming it’s “worse than the prequels” really strike me as being wildy un-objective… of course I’m doubt I can be too objective about it either.  It’s Star Wars dammit, it’s a series that’s ingrained in the back of my psyche and has been since I was a small child so what can I say, it’s a movie that delivered some quality Star Wars and even in this world where Disney is wildly monetizing that IP you don’t really get that too often.

***1/2 out of Five