Category Archives: 2018

Solo: A Star Wars Story

Solo: A Star Wars Story                  4 stars

By now everyone has seen the origin story of Han Solo titles Solo: A Star Wars Story, part of the Disney expansion of the Star Wars universe.  So I won’t go into any great detail about the story, other than to say it was an interesting departure from the other Star Ward movies.  Here story is that of an outlaw, Han Solo, joining with other outlaws to put together a colossal interstellar heist to steal some valuable treasure from some very sinister folks.  There is little mention of the empire or the force and we only see a couple of the characters that are so familiar from the other movies.  There is no shortage of action be it high speed chases, shootouts or space dog fights.  It looks like the critics were split on this one and I come on the side of those who thoroughly enjoyed the film.  Woody Harrelson does his usual bad guy impression as Beckett, the outlaw that Solo teams up with.  Paul Bettany is a convincing evil villain who you better not cross and we even get to see how Chewbacca and Han got together.  Also, Donald Glover and Phoebe Waller-Bridge make a well matched and very mouthy pair.  I could see there being a follow up film starring Alden Ehrenreich as the young Han.  If you haven’t seen it yet, what are you waiting for?

Blaze

Blaze                     4 stars

Blaze is a sad biopic about Texas singer songwriter Blaze Foley, a promising but tortured talent in folk/country music in the seventies and eighties. This film, written and directed by Ethan Hawke explores the music and life of this little-known musician through three different periods told in nonlinear fashion. We see his early life with Jewish girlfriend/wife Sybil (Alia Shawkat), his later days performing in local bars and diners shortly before his untimely death and a later radio interview where his songwriter friends, Townes and Zee talk about the almost legend. I had never heard of Blaze before who is compared to Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. I am not really a fan of this type of country music, but the songs sung by star Ben Dickey, himself a rock/country artist are done well and are mesmerizing. The story of a talented musician who shows signs of greatness but whose life is destroyed by his own ego, addiction to drinking and a short temper are all too familiar in the long list of musician biopics we have seen. The largest part of the story is about his relationship with Sybil who does everything in her power to support Blaze and their marriage but is eventually doomed to failure. The tall and large Ben Dickey who is a friend of Ethan Hawke, does a nice job as Blaze making him appear like a poet/philosopher about life. This film seems to be his only acting credit. I recommend the movie to anyone who enjoys folk and country music and would like to learn about this near legend. Fans of Alia Shawkat (Maeby from Arrested Development) would enjoy the movie as well.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?       5 stars

The documentary by filmmaker Morgan Neville explores the work of Fred Rogers and his long running children’s TV show “Mister Rogers Neighborhood”. It tells us what a radical departure the show was to what passed for Children’s television back in 1968. By using footage from the show and interviews with his wife, the show’s staff and others that knew him, it gives us a close look at Fred Rogers’ philosophy of life and his way of communicating with young children through his use of puppets and discussing frank issues in a caring way. I confess that I never watched the show when I was young preferring those loud and silly shows referred to in the documentary. The film shows how Fred Rogers was determined to help children make sense of some very troubling issues of the times including violence, death and divorce. The movie is only one and a half hours long and is well worth the time spent.

Generation Wealth

Generation Wealth         2 ½ stars

Filmmaker Lauren Greenfield has made a series of documentaries dealing with obsession. A few years ago she made The Queen of Versailles, a film about billionaires David and Jackie Siegel who tried to build the largest house in the country. It’s all part of a career of examining the excesses and materialism of our modern society. Now she brings us Generation Wealth which examines obsession with wealth and the appearance of wealth. She examines the lives of several Americans and some foreign cultures as well as they strive to achieve vast sums of wealth or spend money like they are wealthy. She has been examining this subject as a photographer for her whole career going back to the nineties when she was looking at spending habits of teenagers and has amassed a collection of hundreds of thousands of photos. She looks at so many aspects of the phenomena that I though the film tended to lose focus. Not only does she talk about billionaires, she also looks at American’s obsession with beauty, plastic surgery, child beauty pageants, work and even pornography. Ultimately, she examines her own life and her indulgence in her own career as a photographer. Her subjects are some of the people she has been following in her work for years and ultimately they come to realize that their pursuit of wealth and material possessions does not bring them fulfillment. It’s a depressing movie that was not quite what I was expecting. It could have been more interesting with more limited subjects and without all of the late regrets. I do recommend her earlier work though, The Queen of Versailles.

Wildlife

Wildlife                 3 ½ stars

One type of movie I like to find are the dramas set in small rural towns in the West, South or Midwest. Usually these films feature characters who face bleak prospects and have troubling family problems. Set in 1960 rural Montana, Wildlife fits that description well. It’s about a young couple, Jerry and Jeannette (Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan) and their teenage son Joe (Ed Oxenbould) who have recently moved to town and are struggling financially. Then Jerry loses his job at the country club, so Jeannette and Joe have to pitch in with low paying jobs. In a seemingly desperate act, Jerry volunteers to help fight the forest fires that are ravaging the area for little pay. Of course Jeannette is outraged at the decision, but can do little to change Jerry’s mind. It is here that the film takes a dark turn as Jeannette meets a local wealthy man (Bill Camp) on her job at the YMCA and begins to see him outside of work. She also enlists 14 year old son Joe in the affair by not hiding anything from him. The acting from Oxenbould and Mulligan is excellent and the representations of 1960 America in the cinematography is spot on. The actions that Jeannette and Jerry take often seem unrealistic contributing to an uneven tone throughout the movie.

Burden

Burden                 3 stars

I Missed Burden at Sundance 2018 as it was a hard ticket to get and was an award winner at the festival. Then somehow it wasn’t released to theaters until 2020. Burden is a true story about a poor white man, Mike Burden (Garrett Hedlund), raised on the hatred toward blacks so prevalent in the South. Mike serves the KKK in the small town of Laurens, South Carolina and works as a repo man for a small rent to own company. In both roles he works for Tom Griffin (Tom Wilkinson) who is the Grand Dragon of the local KKK chapter and to whom he regards as a father. Griffin, who preaches white supremacy and violence, has acquired the local dilapidated movie theater in town and turned it into his dream, a museum to the KKK called The Redneck Museum, where the exploits of the Klan such as lynching and cross burnings are glorified. The town has a substantial black population so the museum soon catches the attention of Rev. David Kennedy (Forest Whitaker) who leads protests against the racist museum but in a peaceful manner, in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.  Kennedy still honors his uncle who was lynched by the Klan decades earlier. Then we follow the challenges that Mike faces when he starts seeing Judy (Andrea Riseborough from 2018’s Nancy and 2020’s gorefest, Possessor), a dirt poor single mother who does not approve of Mike’s involvement with the KKK. The movie gives us a picture of the hatred and violence that blacks continue to receive, but this has been done so often in movies before. (See Blackkklansman) The movie is set in the 1990’s so what I don’t see is a representation of the much more subtle forms of racism that are common today. Think of Charlottesville, 2017 and the treatment blacks get from some white police officers. The acting is very good. Hedlund was made for this kind of role, a head strong uneducated white southerner redneck (see also On the Road and Mudbound). I thought the movie didn’t give us enough reason to believe his transformation that led to him leaving the Klan. Though the movie is based on a true story, it has a predictable feel to it. Burden is worth seeing but I wouldn’t call it an award winner.

Never Goin’ Back

Never Goin’ Back                              3 ½ stars

Much in the vein of Superbad and Bridesmaids, Never Goin’ Back brings us Angela and Jessie, two teenage girls who are living on their own glide through various bizarre hijinks in their small world in a Texas town. The two girls are without parents and are best friends who work as waitresses in a local restaurant. Angela has a plan to spend a week at the beach to celebrate Jessie’s seventeenth birthday and has spent the rent money on a hotel room. Thus, the girls must scheme to come up with the rent money while dealing with drug dealers, a few days in jail and getting high on some “cookies”. While often vulgar and crude, the movie has a very comedic core made genuine by the talents of the stars, Maia Mitchell and Camilla Morrone who portray the girls as strong women who would die for each other. The movie is loosely based on the memories of writer/director Augustine Frizzell who apparently spent her teenage years in endless mischief with her best friend in a small Texas town. If you can stomach the bathroom humor, projectile vomit and frequent drug use you may want to give Never Goin’ Back a look.

Tyrel

Tyrel                      3 ½ stars

Tyrel, by director Sebastian Silva can be called a subtle horror movie with a racial twinge. It doesn’t have the sci-fi mind bending elements of Get Out, but is none the less full of racially related moments of tension. Tyler (Jason Mitchell of Mudbound), a young black man has taken up his friend John’s (Christopher Abbott) offer to join him for a guy’s weekend in update New York since Tyler’s girlfriend has taken over his own apartment for the time being. Tyler is surprised to learn that he is the only black person among the eight or so young men at the isolated house in the woods where there is to be an alcohol fueled weekend of reckless games and other foolishness. Upon meeting, one of the white guests mispronounces Tyler’s name as Tyrel, but we are not sure if the act was intentional leaving us to wonder what is to come. The evening proceeds with a silly game where each person takes a turn imitating a voice of different ethnicities with Tyler being asked to imitate a black New Orleans woman. This is awkward to say the least. Although nothing overtly racist is said to our black guest, we are made to feel uncomfortable as many of the remarks said could be called insensitive. I was wondering throughout the film (less than one and a half hours) just how bad things would get for Tyler. He has to constantly stay on the defensive and be careful about how he reacts to various indiscretions such as when one drunk member decides that he should burn a religious painting because it would be funny. Fortunately, it did not descend into full horror, but things are bad enough that we feel for him and hope that he will emerge from a dangerous situation unscathed. The movie is set in the days immediately following the Donald Trump inauguration. (Any movie that involves destroying an effigy of Trump adds a half star to the rating.) Jason Mitchell plays his role well making us believe the fear that he is experiencing. I hope to see more of him in future movies.

I Think We’re Alone Now

I Think We’re Alone Now              2 ½ stars

I Think We’re Alone Now is yet another movie about the end of the world, a common theme nowadays. I finally got around to seeing this film that premiered at Sundance in 2018. Peter Dinklage is Del, the seeming lone survivor of the apocalypse, who spends his days gathering and burying the bodies of the dead and cleaning the houses in his neighborhood. As an introvert, Del seems perfectly fine with this new reality spending time in a library reading and sipping wine until his world is interrupted by the arrival of Grace (Elle Fanning), a loud and talkative teenage girl who is the opposite of Del. At first Del is annoyed by the girl but gradually accepts her and her assistance in cleaning up this world. Both actors are excellent and very well suited to their roles. Dinklage is exceptional at conveying emotions without speaking. The movie is more about a developing relationship than anything about the end of the world. In fact we never find out what the cause is, only that it happened very suddenly. Then the movie takes an abrupt turn revealing that things are not at all what they seem. It turns into something out of The Twilight Zone leaving us to think, “But how did that happen?” The movie is trying to deliver a message that we can grow through pain and sadness, but does it with a plot twist that didn’t seem all that genuine. I have a hard time with movies that have this much of a change in its reality.

The Catcher Was a Spy

The Catcher Was a Spy   3 stars

The Catcher Was a Spy takes us back to the espionage days of World War II when men in trench coats and fedora hats met secretly at night to gather intelligence and plan strategic assassinations. Here director Ben Lewin tells the true story of professional baseball player Moses “Moe” Berg who volunteered for the OSS and was sent on a mission to find and assassinate nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg who may or may not be working on a German atomic bomb. The usually comedic Paul Rudd steps into the dramatic role of Berg and does a decent job given the material. I wanted to like the movie more but there wasn’t enough to get excited about though the combination of sports hero, wartime intrigue and harrowing situations would seem to provide plenty of material. Berg is an interesting subject, given the facts that he was Jewish, studied at universities, spoke several foreign languages and was sometimes perceived as being gay. We don’t get a full picture of Berg and his motives making him a mysterious figure which may be a good thing for the movie. With hindsight we now know that Germany was not close to producing an atomic weapon though it was feared they might be. So perhaps the premise of tracking down a scientist who could be working on such a weapon during a war is not that interesting of a story after all despite the background of the baseball player turned spy. That’s just a thought.