"Solo"

 ☆☆☆½ 

The good news about Solo is that it is the best of the recent, and seemingly inexhaustible, spate of Star Wars films. It's vastly superior to the "formal" sequels, and infinitely better than the first of the "Star Wars Stories," Rogue One.

But there's something less than entirely satisfying about Solo, which I think has to do with how it feels so tangential to the entire Star Wars series of films, which used to be called "the Star Wars Saga" but is feeling increasingly like "the Star Wars Property."  Star Wars has now veered so far away from the story of how a galaxy got itself into (the prequels) and out of (the original trilogy) war that it's hard to know if there's any point to Star Wars at this stage other than making a lot of money.

Maybe that's not a criticism. Maybe it's just a certain resignation to the way things are, but I'm beginning to miss both the schoolboy earnestness of the first films and the grand (and frequently off-putting) formality of the prequels -- these new films mostly pretend those later films didn't happen at all and that the things that made the first ones so wildly popular are the only things really important to  Star Wars.

So, except for one moment that left me scratching my head trying to puzzle out the existence of a certain character, Solo basically lives in the world of the original Star Wars movies, and seems to spend an awful lot of its time winking at the audience: "Did you catch that reference?" There are sets and droids and sound effects and fonts and characters and names and phrases that all sound familiar, and that will absolutely delight the fans.

Solo is like returning to your childhood home and finding it mostly unchanged, while your parents trot out the same photo albums and show us the same souvenirs of childhood: What thrilled us the the first time around, and delighted us the second time around, and amused us the third time around now make us ... comfortable, I guess.

If Solo feels more or less inconsequential -- and by so doing diminishes the light of the original and prequel films just a tad -- it isn't for lack of success on behalf of the actors, the filmmakers, the visual effects artists or, especially, John Williams, who this time around didn't technically write the music but basically did; the soundtrack is one of the most familiar things about Solo, repeating entire passages of music that Star Wars fans have memorized bar by bar.

There had been concern prior to release that Alden Ehrenreich was somehow not good enough as Han Solo, but here's a non-spoiler secret about the film: He's better as Han Solo than Harrison Ford. Yup, it's true. And in ways no one could ever have anticipated, Joonas Suotamo is the best damned Chewbacca there's ever been on screen (no slight toward Peter Mayhew; Chewie simply wasn't a major character in the previous films the way he is here).

Solo gets off to a slow, visually murky start. I couldn't understand quite why the movie looks so underlit until Han, whose surname is given to him as a disappointing throwaway gag, gets off of his home planet of Corellia, where he leaves behind a beautiful woman named Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke), who at first seems inconsequential to the plot but isn't.

There's far too much going on in the first third of Solo, with a train-robbery sequence that should be thrilling but is largely confusing and exhausting, but after a while things settle down and there's a lot of plot exposition and some additional bad guys thrown in, while the whole thing barrels toward the only reason it exists:

In the very first Star Wars film, Han Solo relates that his ship, the Millennium Falcon, "made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs," and since 1977 there has been fan debate over whether George Lucas wrote that line as a joke (since a parsec is a measurement of distance, information that is of no practical use or consequence whatsoever) or whether it meant something more. Solo intends to settle that debate, and the bulk of the movie revolves around making the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. Having seen Solo, I still don't really know the significance of the line.

Nor, really, do I care, because mostly Solo does everything it does with lighthearted jocularity and, for some fans, no doubt, downright hilarity, though for the average viewer it will be mostly just mildly amusing, I think.

Ehrenreich really is the best part of Solo, though as always Woody Harrelson showcases what an underrated actor he really is, and there's also a very funny supporting turn by Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the voice of a hyper-aware droid. Her role is takes on a rather weird spin toward the end, as Solo implies some extreme pan-sexuality on behalf of Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover, playing up the charm of a fan-favorite character).

Despite all of its positive attributes, though, Solo feels slight and entirely inconsequential, despite its hefty 135-minute running time. It held my interest more than any of the recent Star Wars movies have (again, give thanks to Alden Ehrenreich) and yet, I kept wondering why we were being told this story, and what it mattered, especially since Solo, like Revenge of the Sith and Rogue One before it, makes a big point of leading us right up to the original Star Wars.

Forty-one years ago, that film burst on to the scene with the shock and force (sorry) of something entirely new, a story that was both familiar and completely unknown. Solo fully embraces the familiar while eliminating some of the mystery and appeal of the original films in its jovial telling of the history of what was, after all, a supporting character. Who, we wondered back then, was this ill-behaved good guy with a gleam in his eye?

The key concept there was that we wondered, which was part of the fun. Solo takes away some of that fun, at least for the casual viewer -- though nowadays what I wonder is whether "casual" Star Wars viewers really exist. If they do, they might be underwhelmed by Solo, but everyone else might be delighted to have all the answers they never even knew they wanted.



Viewed May 24, 2018 -- AMC Burbank 6

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"RBG"

 ☆☆☆½ 

Compare the straightforward, sober-minded yet still playful approach that a documentary like RBG takes compared with the wild-eyed, manufactured hysteria of Dinesh D'Souza's Obama's 2016, which remains one of the top-grossing documentaries of all time.

It's worth doing, since unlike that conservative fever dream of weird reenactments, breathless, conspiratorial narration, and lack of factual material, RBG is a production of CNN, but could be accused of taking a slanted view of the country's most visible Supreme Court justice.

Slackjawed and bemused, I've watched D'Souza's films, which can be termed as documentaries only in the loosest sense -- and while this is not intended to be a denunciation of those films, it's worth examining how the extreme right-wing ideology has trouble finding even a basic narrative that can be explored with real interviews that talk about actual events.

If RBG, an inspiring though lightweight new documentary by directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen, has a fault its that it is a little too straightforward -- D'Souza made bold claims, like saying that Democrats "plan to steal America." RBG has slightly less lofty claims: at no time does it accuse "the thieves" of "wanting to own you," it merely wants to show the arc of a woman who went from being a "barely second-generation" daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants to sitting on the most important legal panel in the country, if not the world.

The story of Bader's early life begins a theme that is never far from the narrative of RBG: This is an indefatigable woman who is inherently incapable of slowing down. It's both fun and mildly alarming to hear her own family marvel at the way that Bader Ginsburg managed to go to law school, find time to play with her young daughter and -- the real kicker -- help her husband successfully fight cancer.

And through it all, Bader Ginsburg did something both entirely mundane and thoroughly life-changing: She took a back seat to her husband, who recovered from his illness, took a job in New York -- and led her to have to change schools mid-way through achieving her law degree.

All of this is told with the traditional (but effective) tools of professional documentarians: interviews, archival footage and photographs, and memories from the subject.  There are no attempts to reenact either Ginsburg's life or the conflicts of the day, no need to revise history to make it fit the narrative: RGB just tells us the story as it happened.

And it's quite a story, nicely recounted by people who knew RBG during her early years and who were close to her as she struggled to find employment just as she had struggled to be taken seriously by the all-male law schools.  The "liberal bias" that exists in RBG comes in part from the slap-in-the-face shock of seeing just how deeply engrained and entirely quotidian gender bias was in the 1960s.

RBG makes no secret of the fact that RBG wanted to focus her career on gender-equality -- and that her ideology is unrepentantly liberal.  The film takes it as fact that every Supreme Court justice has a personal ideology, and takes a moment to talk about how the group tries to reach consensus.  It's this section of the film that feels the least fulfilling, though -- RBG is willing to show you a bit of how Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself works, but very little about how the Supreme Court operates. The closest we come is learning about the odd-couple friendship, which seemed sincere and genuine, between RBG and Antonin Scalia, but there's no deeper dive into finding out how they deal with their inherent disagreements during the critical decision-making period.

RBG is also not very much helped by its own subject.  As the movie repeatedly points out, she is a quiet woman who doesn't naturally seek the spotlight, soft-spoken even if firm of opinion. Over and over, we hear how unusual it is for a person of her stature to take such a back seat -- and yet, her brilliant arguments have been enough to change the hearts and minds of people who intensely disagree with her.

It's that talent of Ginsburg's that I hoped to learn more about, and if RBG doesn't show us quite enough of that, at the very least it also doesn't resort to producing low-budget re-enactments with community-theater-level actors.  Everything in RBG is designed to be a real documentary, produced by real journalists who have found a compelling -- if not entirely revelatory -- story.

It backs away from some of the toughest stuff, like finding out exactly what's on the mind of Ginsburg, who had toyed with the idea of retiring a few years ago but now seems, at least based on conventional wisdom, to have reason to stick it out as long as humanly possible.  How does that make her feel?  What are her thoughts on the direction that recent decisions have taken the court?

You're not going to find that in RBG. What you'll find instead is a story of a determined, resilient woman whose view of the Constitution is both shockingly simple and wonderfully direct -- she holds to her beliefs strongly, and isn't afraid to dissent, though I wish RBG had made a little bit more about what those dissents mean and why they matter so much.

Still, everything you see in the warm, uplifting, intriguing RBG is real, including the cult of personality that has grown up around her, particularly in the Trump era. She's a real woman with real foibles and, most importantly, real beliefs -- some of the most well-considered and committed beliefs of anyone in Washington. In RBG, Ruth Bader Ginsburg will inspire you with her early story and charm you with her current views.  In other hands, this could have turned into an in-your-face "Notorious RBG" quasi-doc focused on her liberal dissents, but that would be the realm of other, less sophisticated filmmakers with hateful agenda to push.

At the least, RBG seems almost to have no point of view, other than giving us an in-depth glimpse into one of the century's most important legal minds. It may not be as breathless and as hysterical as it might have been (her story certainly gives it right to be), but that would have made it an entirely different documentary.

This one focuses on the facts -- yes, those pesky things. We may live in a "post-truth" world, but a movie like RBG reminds us not only that truth matters, but that truth and facts can be combined to make the kind of documentary that presents ideas, that explores humans, that tells us something good about what's happening in our world.  On that level, at the very least, if you're even mildly interested in politics RBG is a documentary that shouldn't be missed.




Viewed May 13, 2018 -- AMC Burbank 8

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"Isle of Dogs"

 ☆☆☆½ 

Is Isle of Dogs dissatisfying yet wonderful, or wonderful yet dissatisfying? I know it's both, but I can't figure out if one of those emotions matters more than the other.

Every frame of Wes Anderson's stop-motion animated film is filled with incredible marvels -- this is a film I'd love to see again just to look at it, but not for any sort of emotional satisfaction, because there is no real emotional satisfaction in this film.

Watching it is akin to eavesdropping on a conversation between two really smart, droll, witty people who know that they are smart, droll and witty and aren't even aware of how much posturing they're both doing, trying endlessly to outdo each other. You're sort of glad when they finally move across the room.

The film is the same way, starting out with a dazzling visual inventiveness that first seems extraordinary, then seems overwhelming, and finally is a little exhausting.

And yet, because stop-motion animation -- even in its simplest form -- is always astonishing to behold and kind of awesome to consider, Isle of Dogs is always visually breathtaking. Maybe I didn't latch on to the story because there's so much going on in each and every frame, and because knowing what I know of stop-motion animation I couldn't stop thinking about what went into making it.

In every movie, what you see up there on screen is there deliberately. In hand-drawn animation, that's even more true -- even the smallest touches require an artist to create them. In CG animation, the level of detail can be overwhelming. But in stop-motion animation, everything that is seen on screen -- every single item, even the smallest of the small, has to be physically crafted by hand.

As if that weren't enough, all of it needs to be photographed a single frame at a time, with tiny changes in between each individual image. So, as those images flew past my eyes at 24 frames per second (that is, 24 individual moments with 24 minute variations), I kept thinking of just how little my eye was actually taking in, just how much work some people put into even one of those frames all so most of it could go unnoticed.

One tiny little prop in particular stood out: my eye latched on to a dog biscuit. In the plot of the film, the biscuit is kept zipped up in the silver flight suit worn by a boy named Atari.  Like many of the humans in the film, Atari speaks only Japanese, while all of the dogs in the movie speak English (which the film notes up front has been translated from barks by a panoply of interpreters).  The story takes place in the future, on a Japanese island city where dogs have come down with terrible illnesses, and an unscrupulous politician has turned human sentiment against all canines -- so much so that everyone thinks it's a great idea to scoop up all dogs and ship them off to Trash Island, where they won't be a health threat.

Akira is the ward of the ugly politician, who has some very, uh, shall we say, populist and isolationist views. The first dog to be taken to Trash Island is the politician's own dog, Spots, who has been a loyal bodyguard and companion to Akira.  So Akira steals an airplane, flies it to Trash Island, and goes looking for Spots.

Along the way, he meets a number of dogs, none of whom can understand the language Atari speaks, while he can't understand them, so everyone kind of does their best to try to sort out their intentions, which is in a lot of ways what all of us are doing every single day.

All the dogs on the Isle of Dogs mostly work together, though they are led by a dog named Chief, whose most significant trait is that he doesn't want to be a leader. They all help Akira look for Spots, who may be dead -- or may be the stuff of legend.

The plot goes in lots of different directions as back in Megasaki City an American foreign-exchange student develops a weird crush on Atari, while there's a lot of political intrigue -- and even a sinister assassination -- and, simultaneously, Atari, Chief, and dogs like Rex, King and Boss help Atari track down Spots.  The plot becomes incredibly complex, far more than is needed, but Wes Anderson films tend to like to have a lot of fancy, intriguing moving parts, even if most of them, like some old Victorian machine, don't actually do anything.

In a live-action film, that can be wearying, and indeed that's what I often find to be the case with Anderson's movies, but with Isle of Dogs it doesn't really matter much.  I may have lost (and later picked up) some of the strands of the plot, but it was only because my eyes were so wide looking at the movie.

It's an auditory marvel, too, with voices like Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Jeff Goldblum, Tilda Swinton and many, many other ultra-hip actors saying ultra-hip things (my favorite credit is the one for Anjelica Huston as "Mute Poodle"), which makes the act of listening to Isle of Dogs like hearing the best NPR radio play ever.

But none of that -- not the plot, not the actors -- really matters when there's so much to look at, like that dog biscuit.

It shows up on screen for about six seconds, all told, roughly the amount of time it takes for Atari to remove it from his pocket, break it in half and put it in a dog's mouth. What made me focus on it is that the dog biscuit is designed to look just like a real dog biscuit would: it's rough and uneven, with the name of the dog biscuit company imprinted on it, and it looks like it was rolled out by hand and baked in an oven.

But it wasn't. Someone had to design it, and figure out how it would look and what color it would be, and what the texture would be like, and decide the name of the company that makes it, and how big it should be, and how it should sit in the hand of the little boy, and then how it would crunch when it gets to the dog's mouth.

There are greater, much more impressive sights to behold in Isle of Dogs (the dogs and Atari all take an aerial tram trip that is glorious) but I got fixated on the dog biscuit, and while I can't remember too much of the plot, and while I didn't much care what happened to the characters in the movie, I was struck by how much time, effort and care went into that one little prop -- and by how simultaneously unsatisfying and richly rewarding this movie is. It's a strange movie, but in this case, strange is sometimes pretty wonderful.



Viewed May 12, 2018 -- Pacific Sherman Oaks 5

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"Black Panther"

 ☆☆☆½ 

Long after the rest of the world, I finally saw Black Panther today, and I find myself understanding why it has been such a big hit yet more frustrated than ever at the Marvel "cinematic universe," which dictates that every story be engineered to fit into every other story.

Why?

There's no denying the popularity of the conceit and on some level it's impossible not to be impressed by the level of detail that each film contains, filled with references to other films and stories, careful to ensure that all the pieces of the puzzle interlock with each other just so.

And yet, if ever there were a Marvel film -- or a comic-book film of any sort -- deserving to stand on its own, this is the one, and not just because its characters look and sound different from the handsome caucasian casts of the other films but because its story is so well-conceived that it's a shame it isn't something created to be appreciated and viewed entirely on its own.

But it's not, it's part of the bigger Marvel world, which still confounds me because it's like watching Singin' in the Rain and being distracted by references to Dorothy and Kansas, or watching Cinderella and being on the lookout for the cameos by Sneezy and Pinocchio. Why does this trouble me so much? I'm hard-pressed to explain it, though I'm aware that I'm maybe the only person it bothers.

It's an unnecessary distraction in the case of Black Panther, but then as much as I liked the film, which was significantly more than I imagined, that kind of detail causes my mind to wander in Marvel films more than it does in most. Some of the thoughts and questions that ran through my mind while watching Black Panther:

• *The big car-chase set piece sure seems to belong to another film; the middle third of Black Panther was the least interesting to me by far -- do we really need more cars and guns and chases?
• For movies about heroes who save the world, Black Panther follows in the same footsteps as other Marvel films: it's overwhelmingly, almost distressingly, violent; is it any wonder we're living in such violent times when every character in these movies is armed to the teeth?
• At least here in L.A. where I live, slow-speed, single-car police chases merit live broadcasts by every TV station in town; how is it possible that massive, spectacular car chases featuring super heroes wearing impermeable material and cars that appear and disappear seemingly go unnoticed by the larger world?
• The bad guy in Black Panther turns out to be named "Eric," which I know must have come from the comics but struck me as almost giggle-worthy -- "Eric" is such a wholesome name for a super villain, isn't it?
• To the point about the car chases, there's a key scene in which Eric and the other bad guy, Claw (whose name turns out to be spelled "Klaue"), break in to a big museum in London and abscond with an important artifact -- they even kill several people in the museum. Wouldn't that attract an awfully big amount of attention in today's world?  Wouldn't there be about 45 news helicopters flying over the building before they even had a chance to escape?
• The country of Wakanda is apparently invisible, but it's filled with gigantic skyscrapers and wide-open vistas; wouldn't Google Earth have picked up on that by now?
• The Wakandan underground scientific facilities are so ultra-modern that it's curious the streets of the country remain unpaved -- I genuinely wanted to know more about the history of this fictional country, and think the film really missed a bet by reverting to fight scenes and car chases.
• The king of Wakanda is named T'Challa, which is a fantastic name; but the villain is still stuck with "Eric"?  (I know, I know, it's just going off of the comics, but imagine if Luke Skywalker's fearsome nemesis was named "Steve"?)
• The fight scene between T'Challa and Eric (who, finally, adopts his Wakandan name N'Jakada, though I found it hard to think of him as anything but "Eric") atop a towering waterfall is maybe the first action scene in a Marvel movie that has gotten me emotionally invested; it's a great scene, even though it's cut in such a hyperkinetic way -- I miss the days when fights were carefully choreographed and shot in one long take.
• One of the Wakandan tribes lives in the snowy mountains, which plays against the dusty Wakanda desert beautifully; this is a gorgeous film to watch.
• Was its story of an untrained, unprepared interloper with war-mongering, ego-driven sensibilities a response to our own political upheaval, or are our global political troubles merely convenient for Black Panther?

On that last point, there's also the obligatory "end credit scene." Though it feels tacked on to this movie, it also provides an intriguing view of where the movie could have gone.  Instead of bringing us car chases and gun battles, how much more intriguing would Black Panther have been if it had spent more time connecting the Wakandan world view to our own, watching what happens when a country that has spent its entire history building walls decided to tear them down.

That's the kind of really fascinating possibility that Black Panther contains, even though it isn't, alas,  the kind of movie the Marvel Cinematic Universe is inclined to make. Black Panther is the first Marvel film with real ideas -- and the irony of that is that it might have been even more intriguing if it hadn't been a Marvel film at all.



Viewed May 6, 2018 -- AMC Sunset 5

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"Tully"

 ☆☆☆½ 

Like a hipster Mary Poppins, maintaining a coy mysteriousness about her age and dressed in the vaguely inappropriate style of a girl who refuses to grow up, Tully almost magically appears in the life of a woman whose life and whose family is in disarray.

Tully (played with ever-smiling sensitivity by Mackenzie Davis) is a "night nanny," whose job is to give the mother of a newborn some much-needed rest through the evening so, in theory, she can be fresher, more alert and more present for her children and her family the next day.

Hiring Tully isn't the first choice of Marlo (Charlize Theron) or her husband Drew (Ron Livingston), but is instead the brainchild, so to speak, of Marlo's wealthy, supercilious brother (Mark Duplass), who sees how exhausted Marlo is before she even gives birth to her third child. This baby is, to use the charitable turn of phrase, unplanned, and with a precocious daughter and apparently autistic son already taking up more time and headspace than she has available, Marlo overcomes her initial reluctance and calls on Tully.

The younger woman shows up in the middle of the night, almost sneaking in to the house and taking over exactly where Marlo leaves off -- gently waking her in the middle of the night when the baby is hungry, and using the rest of her time to get the house in order and open long-closed doors of thought and conversation with Marlo.

It's not long before Marlo is wearing makeup, going jogging and getting her life back, and this is the point that Diablo Cody's witty, endearing script started losing me -- because despite the female-centric storyline that puts Marlo's frustrations, fears and limitations front and center, there's a weird undercurrent of a more troubling message here: Marlo isn't herself because she isn't pretty.  It's not just sleep-deprivation and exhaustion that have settled in, it's physical ugliness. In one of the film's many one-liners, Marlo's daughter looks at her mother's stretch marks and sagging belly and expresses disgust.

Yet, once Tully arrives, Marlo has time to be more like herself, hiding her tiredness under makeup (which the film later professes to see as a crutch) and blossoming and beaming when she finally has time to exercise and lose weight -- and worry less about her baby.

Meanwhile, Tully views her videogame-obsessed husband and status-obsessed brother with appropriate disdain, but it started making me wonder: According to Tully, who is a worthy person?  It seems only the thin, happy, gentle, well-balanced and impossibly pretty Tully herself is a person to be emulated, and just as this thought started becoming more troublesome in my mind, Tully did something really unexpected that caught me thoroughly off-guard and made me wonder what exactly the movie had been trying to do all along.

At least initially, it doesn't look like even Jason Reitman's confident direction (which includes a very nice eye for place-setting, aided by Eric Steelberg's cinematography) will be able to overcome the quirky storytelling decision that Cody's script takes, especially since such melodramatic, what's-the-meaning-of-it-all silliness ruined Reitman's last film, the genuinely awful Men, Women & Children.

Maybe it's because Charlize Theron is so good -- so honest and sincere, so dry and funny, so willing to take the risks that bring her character surprising depth amid Cody's one-liners -- or maybe it's because the relationship between Marlo and Tully is so fulfilling that Tully overcomes this weird, not-entirely-satisfying turn that had me waffling about whether I liked the movie or whether its last 15 minutes just lost me entirely.

I'm still on the fence about it dramatically, and the too-good-to-be-true Tully herself wears on the nerves a bit with her Earth-Mother patience and encyclopedic knowledge (though Davis is always very good), Tully manages to remain engaging and endearing.

Still, it's interesting to see how screenwriter Cody, whose screenplay for Juno won her an Oscar, doesn't quite have her finger on the way life works for the "little people." Marlo's problems are genuine and overwhelming ones, and the solutions Tully presents often seem just a bit too contrived, especially when Theron works so hard to ground them in an exasperated, resigned reality.




Viewed May 4, 2018 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

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