Joy (2015)

Joy rounds out a kind of thematic trilogy for director David O. Russell, but it’s a trilogy unified more by a stable company of performers – chief among them Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and Robert De Niro, with a few other bit players recurring in the mix. Of these, preceded by Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, Joy is perhaps the least successful of the lot – not by dint of being an abject failure but by never quite reaching the heights of the other two. Lawrence, however, turns in what might be her best performance yet.

Jennifer Lawrence stars as Joy Mangano, the QVC maven who made her millions with the Miracle Mop, a self-wringing cleaning device borne out of her own frustrations as a single mother living with both her father (Robert De Niro) and her ex-husband (Edgar Ramirez) in the basement. Bradley Cooper has a small supporting role as Neil Walker, the QVC exec who puts Joy’s product into the market.

Joy isn’t going to go down as Russell’s strongest film – I really do think Silver Linings Playbook holds that title – but I do think Lawrence has done her best work as a member of the Russell company, and I would put very real money on her seeing a third Best Actress nomination at the top of next year. As the eponymous Joy, Lawrence is riveting, from her beleaguered moments in the home to her natural charisma before the QVC camera. The film tasks Joy with representing the struggles faced by all women, and Lawrence is more than capable of bearing that weight.

That universality is one of the peculiarities of the film because I can’t help feeling that it would have been more successful had it adhered more strictly to the unique aspects of Joy’s story rather than an attempt to make her “every woman.” For one, I think the QVC sequences are among the best in the film, and I would have preferred this to be more than a small subplot. Russell has an eye for the innate strangeness of the QVC network, and a fuller treatment of that material (including the wonderfully strange cameo of Melissa Rivers as her mother Joan) would have been truly engaging – to say nothing of the chemistry that Lawrence and Cooper clearly have. Honestly, that’s the movie I thought we were getting, but sadly it’s unlikely we’ll see a Joy 2 that fleshes out that relationship in greater depth.

The movie keeps its eye tightly focused on Joy, often to the detriment of the other performers. It’s not that De Niro or Cooper are any less captivating than they usually are – De Niro is scene-stealing, particularly in an early tantrum about his ex-wife’s similarities with a gas leak – it’s more that there is just less of them to captivate. On reflection, it seems the largest supporting role belongs to Isabella Rossellini as Trudy, Joy’s principal investor and commercial mentor of sorts whose idiosyncratic approach to vetting entrepreneurs lends the film one of its greatest moments of empowerment. These moments provide glimpses of the A+ work that Joy might have aspired to be, had it taken off its Lawrence-shaped blinders.

Rotten Tomatoes has the self-congratulatory pun that the film “only sporadically sparks bursts of the titular emotion.” This joke misses the point of the film, because if you wanted a movie about joy you’ll have to check out Pixar’s summer offering Inside Out. This is instead a film about Joy, whose story is told reasonably well here, though the audience rightfully detects that Russell is capable of a fuller film than this. It’s perfectly serviceable, but transcendence belongs to the earlier films in this unofficial trilogy.

Joy is rated PG-13 for “brief strong language.” As might be expected, De Niro gets one F-bomb.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

First of all, if you haven’t seen The Force Awakens just yet, read on without fear of being spoiled (although really, what else did you have to do this weekend?). I’m very sensitive to the fact that this is a film with a heavy curtain of secrecy around it. The spoilers are out there if you really want them, but I’d advise anyone to go into The Force Awakens with a clean palate because this is a film that works best when it washes over you and introduces itself to you on its own terms. It’s a remarkable achievement, breathing new life into a franchise that needed it, setting a fantastic tone for the forthcoming Disney era.

Again, no spoilers here, so I’ll refrain from the usual plot synopsis, only to say that the film’s opening title crawl is immensely captivating stuff, clicking into place a lot of the rumors and official releases such that you have an instant sense of the state of that galaxy far, far away these thirty years after Return of the Jedi. In addition to the familiar faces of Han Solo (Harrison Ford), Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), and Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) – listed in the order they’re credited on the film – The Force Awakens introduces us to a new trio: stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega), scavenger Rey (Daisy Ridley), and hotshot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac). And menacing the galaxy is one more black-clad acolyte of the dark side, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), and the First Order’s plan to unseat the Republic.

I found myself thinking immediately of the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi from Return of the Jedi: “You cannot escape your destiny.” And while I’m on record as being one of those moviegoers who ordinarily detests the deus ex machina of destiny, it’s undeniably woven into the fabric of the Star Wars universe, and director JJ Abrams does some very intriguing work with it. Throughout The Force Awakens, we have characters who are either running from their destiny or sprinting headlong toward it, and all of them end up pretty much exactly where they are meant to be – from the stormtroopers in the opening scene to the folks present in the final shot of the film (and what a gorgeous, sweeping final shot it is). Heck, even Greg Grunberg, a childhood friend of Abrams, fulfills his destiny by appearing here as an X-wing pilot.

JJ Abrams had the unenviable task of being the only person to direct a Star Wars film without George Lucas's hand on his shoulder (including, of course, The Clone Wars and that horrible thing I watched last Friday). While I’ve never been a full Abrams disciple, there’s no question that he more than lives up to the legacy of the original trilogy. (As for the prequels, they’re largely set aside, save for one passing reference.) As a director, Abrams keeps the pace of the film at an even clip, sprinkling in enough humor to make this possibly the funniest Star Wars film in the saga without compromising the film’s overall tone. More apparent is the film’s reverential and referential attitude toward the original trilogy; nearly every sequence in the film has some callback to a previous moment, giving lie to George Lucas’s oft-quoted refrain about the poetry of the saga. But what’s remarkable here is that the aggregate effect isn’t one of plagiarism; there’s a deference, to be sure, to what came before, but it advances the saga forward and cues up more than enough for Episodes VIII and IX to continue to explore.

Bizarrely, and actually gratefully, I’m more interested in the new characters than in the returning faces. Yes, there’s a wonderful reintroduction moment for every returning character (even the ones you weren’t expecting to be applause-worthy), but the Finn-Rey-Poe trio could easily be the new Luke-Leia-Han for this generation, and not necessarily in that order. This is great news for the franchise as a whole, because it shows that Star Wars is capable of sustaining itself beyond the inevitable first flash of nostalgia that The Force Awakens was always destined (there’s that word again) to invoke. And say what you want about the prequels, but they always pointed to A New Hope, never sufficiently building their own world (save for those long and tedious political conversations). The Force Awakens propels the narrative forward, to say nothing of the introduction of an equally compelling trio (or quartet, depending on how you do the math) of antagonists. Let’s just say this – Kylo Ren is everything we wanted from Hayden Christensen’s Anakin Skywalker.

I’ll have to see the film again to give a more detailed assessment – I know there are folks chomping at the bit to talk about some of the more spoileriffic details – and I’d like to revisit the film with more of the John Williams score under my belt. I was just too overwhelmed by the film to drink it all in at once. And that’s such a good thing. I felt myself smiling like a child again once those blue words “A long time ago...” appeared on the screen, felt my jaw fall as the title crawl clued me into the story. I smiled, I laughed, I gasped, and I very nearly cried in a few moments, and not only out of sadness when the film went for the emotional tug. My eyes were misty because I felt, finally, I’d come home. Chills up my arms, chokes in my throat (not the kind induced by the dark side, mind you), and a permanent grin across my face: these were the feelings The Force Awakens conjured up in me. Like some magical incantation, cast out across the void of decades, Star Wars is back.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is rated PG-13 for “sci-fi action violence.” This film is slightly bloodier than previous Star Wars films, but the level of violence and action is about the same.

The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)

Last night while the rest of the world slept, fans across the country were united in projecting their hopes, dreams, and imaginations against the latest – and, some have said, greatest – Star Wars film.

This is not a review of that film. This is a review written by a very confused, very dissatisfied Star Wars fan who, for the first and likely last time in his life, inflicted upon himself the horror, the horror, that is The Star Wars Holiday Special from 1978.

Any attempt to summarize the plot of The Star Wars Holiday Special, such as it is, would be doomed to inevitable failure. Suffice it to say that something has happened to prevent Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) from attending some kind of festivity (the nebulously defined “Life Day”), leading the audience to be held captive for a series of bizarre and senseless vignettes which can only loosely be defined as tangentially relevant to the Star Wars universe, including the sale of a mustache groomer, a Wookiee cooking/drag show, a kaleidoscopic sex drug, and the first appearance of Boba Fett, which is in no way, shape, or form worth sitting through this monstrosity.

To say that this film is unwatchable by modern standards would be to pay The Star Wars Holiday Special a compliment. It is, in fact, unwatchable by any standards of any generation ever. Ten minutes in, I was already not sure whether what I had seen – an interminably long segment which consists of an apparent Married With Children script done entirely in Wookiee-speak followed by a hallucinatory juggling act with Chewbacca’s bloated son Lumpy as voyeur – was actually real or whether I had somehow died on the way home that evening and dreamt up the rest.

The Holiday Special – a poor name indeed, for it is neither festive nor special –  is so catastrophically mystifying that it is a great wonder that Star Wars became the fan-fueled juggernaut that it is today. One wonders how many fans looked at this thing and never returned to that galaxy far, far away, for fear of getting another Holiday Special as recompense for their entertainment dollar. After twenty-five minutes, I felt so insensate that I wondered if Jar Jar Binks might show up as the least offensive thing on the screen. That’s right; a racist cartoon rabbit would not only fit in perfectly in the milieu of the Holiday Special, but might actually have been the most entertaining part of it. Wrap the ethical centers of your brain around that one.

Thirty minutes in, I had to go to the bathroom. I considered leaving it run in my absence, wondering if it would make a difference. I started asking myself a lot of questions. Would I miss anything of merit? (No.) How the hell did they get Art Carney to appear in this travesty? Was this still canon, in the wake of the Great Disney Purge? Had it ever been canon? What had become of my life that I was thinking so deeply about this thing at eleven at night? Could I ever enjoy anything ever again?

Halfway through the Holiday Special, my computer abruptly restarted itself. A scan of my computer revealed no corrupted processes, no viruses, no malware. It is as if my computer refused to suffer any further indignity by playing a moment more of the Holiday Special than was absolutely necessary, as if it wished to spare me the perpetual suffering. As I verified that my computer wasn’t irreparably damaged by the experience, I found myself at a crossroads. I could go to bed, post the review as if I’d seen the whole thing. No one would know. No one would ever have to know, and I’d probably be doing myself a favor. But, equal parts stubborn and honest, I soldiered on.

Thank heavens I did. Not because the animated segment lived up to any expectations at all. No, I’m thankful I didn’t give up so that I’m never tempted to sit through this thing again. I can now say that I’ve watched the first appearance of Boba Fett, and the cartoon episode which interrupts the Holiday Special is as shambolic, plotless, and pointless as anything else in the ninety-some minutes of my life I’m never getting back. Then there’s a strange scene in which Bea Arthur cuddles with a hamster while tending bar at the Mos Eisley Cantina, in which the set and the costuming look even cheaper than their playfully hokey appearance in the original Star Wars film.

It’s at this moment in the Holiday Special that my mind returns to inquisition. Is this thing meant to be funny? Coherent? It’s certainly neither, though there are moments that playact at the former. In short, what the hell is this thing supposed to be, and on what level did anyone look at the finished product and say, “Yep, that’s something I want the rest of the world to see”? If this film was so much as shown a picture of a cohesive narrative, it wasn’t looking. It’s as if George Lucas had a child with David Lynch, and then that child were given a box of Star Wars action figures and a Betamax video camera, and then that child snorted a tremendous amount of cocaine and passed out. The Star Wars Holiday Special is that fever dream.

Thank God I’m going to see The Force Awakens in a matter of hours. I had said of the new film, “It can’t be worse than The Phantom Menace.” What I should have said was, “It can’t be as unfathomably inaccessible as The Star Wars Holiday Special.”

The Star Wars Holiday Special is rated why are you even still reading this.

Spotlight (2015)

After the credits rolled on Spotlight, I turned to my moviegoing companion and murmured, “That is what I wanted Truth to be.” A few weeks back I took the Cate Blanchett/Robert Redford movie to task for “all the self-congratulation of an Aaron Sorkin screenplay but less of the snappy prose,” and I stand by those words because Spotlight shows us how it’s done, emblematic of everything a journalism film ought to be – taut, gripping, honest, and well-performed.

Spotlight is the horrifyingly true story of a team of Boston Globe reporters (among them Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, and Rachel McAdams) and their editor (Liev Schreiber) who uncover mounting evidence of widespread child abuse in the Catholic Church. I invoke “horror” because of the dispiriting spiral of abuse the team uncovers, learning quickly that the story they’re working on encompasses as many as 87 priests and systemic attempts to cover up the scandal, which only begins to see light when a beleaguered attorney (Stanley Tucci) organizes a class-action suit against the Church.

The very first thing one notes about Spotlight – and indeed my principal motivation for seeing the film – is the impressive ensemble cast who are bound to be competing against each other when the Oscar nominations are announced next month. There’s not a face on the screen who doesn’t already carry a tremendous amount of screen presence from their previous work, and the only unfamiliar face – Brian d’Arcy James – pulls double-time to make up for the fact that he’s not immediately recognizable. The lot of them are doing award-caliber work with characters that are apparently quite close to their real-life counterparts. Keaton and Ruffalo are immensely compelling, particularly when the two butt heads on the story. The screen crackles when Keaton and McAdams go on interviews together, and it is as ever a delight to see Stanley Tucci in another idiosyncratic supporting role as the self-described only Armenian in Boston.

I had a critique formulating at about the midpoint in the film where I felt the characters weren’t clearly delineated enough, that their narrative places could be interchanged without much compromise to the narrative – that, in short, Spotlight was more about the telling of the story than the tellers. Which, to be fair, in a very real sense it is, but it’s also indicative of the slow-burn approach to the characters taken by director Tom McCarthy (he of Station Agent and an acting turn in Good Night and Good Luck, which feels of a piece with Spotlight). Rather than frontload the characterization, we find out more about the reporters’ motivations as the film unfolds. By the end of the film, and I confess this is a clever move, we’re left to reflect on the degree to which what we learn about the reporters influenced the way they pursued the story.

What surprised me about Spotlight was that there really was no “untold story” that the film exposes. It proceeds about how you’d expect – an investigation begins, details are uncovered, the story is published. (There’s one somewhat surprising historical curveball thrown into the mix, one that contextualizes the investigation in a very profound way, one that reminds you just how long ago all this happened.) What is remarkable is just how compelling this manages to be. And I’m returning to the Truth comparison because Spotlight manages its moral outrage without a sense of preachiness and without ever feeling baggy under the weight of its self-righteousness. Instead, its taut simplicity is its greatest strength, and its exemplary filmmaking ought be seen before the screenings fill up with post-Oscar bandwagoners.

Spotlight is rated R for “some language including sexual references.” The film contains in the neighborhood of 10 F-bombs and about twice as many scatological expletives. Though no abuse is ever depicted on screen, we do see survivors speaking frankly about the incidents and the emotional trauma thereafter.

The Good Dinosaur (2015)

The usual disclaimers apply here: I’m a Disney shill, love Pixar movies, and have a fondness for dinosaurs. I tend to cry buckets at each one of these films, etc. etc. Most of this is all still true, though quantitatively fewer tears were shed at The Good Dinosaur than at, say, Inside Out or Toy Story 3. And perhaps that’s emblematic of my reaction to The Good Dinosaur as a whole: it does a lot of the same things well that Pixar movies overall tend to do, but I’m left feeling a little bit less than I wanted.

In a world where dinosaurs never went extinct and instead took up agriculture, young Arlo (Raymond Ochoa) is desperate to prove himself to his family and make his mark on the world. After a storm separates him from his family, Arlo strikes up an unlikely bond with an evolving human he names Spot. Together, the pair has a whole lot of wilderness to cross before they can get back home.

Here’s the thing (and I know that I usually begin a sentence with that when there might be bad news to follow) – The Good Dinosaur is a bit of disappointment in much the same way (though certainly not to the same degree) that I was disappointed by the trailer for the dismal specter of Alvin & the Chipmunks: The Road Chip: “Oh, this again.” I say the difference is by degree, for there’s little more soul-shattering than the looming threat of yet another squeaky-voiced milked-for-its-last-dollar insult to the word “comedy.” But there is, unfortunately for a studio otherwise prized for its innovation, something all too familiar about The Good Dinosaur. There’s a liberal amount borrowed from The Lion King, The Land Before Time (one of them, anyway), and even a bit from Disney’s own Dinosaur only fifteen years back.

This level of distraction, a kind of narrative déjà vu, is never a good sign on film, because it means that the story isn’t holding you as closely as it ought to be. And indeed, The Good Dinosaur retreads quite literally much of the same ground as some of Pixar’s better films – Toy Story and its sequel, Brave, Up, Finding Nemo, and to a degree Inside Out – in that it’s yet another story about someone traveling through somewhere to get home and learning something about themselves in the process. Yes, it’s a tale at least as old as Homer’s Odyssey, but there’s something less compelling about it this time around (I never, for example, noticed until now the repetition in Inside Out of the road story).

Rather than play backseat driver to the film and tell it what it should have done differently, I will say that the film isn’t a failure. It is simply, as the title indicates, good but not great. It’s a testament to the strength of Pixar’s abilities that even one of its less successful films is still quite good. Two things really stand out here, the first of which is the animation, particularly of the backgrounds. The backdrops are visually breathtaking, and it’s worth staying through the first round of end credits just to see these images unadulterated by the presence of animated figures in the foreground. Though the cartoony nature of the characters never quite resolves with the photorealistic settings, there are moments when it’s quite easy to forget that none of what you’re seeing is real; the mountains, skies, and running waters of the film are visually stunning.

Second, the tears. And yet, there are some to be had in The Good Dinosaur, and they’re in wordless sequences – first, when Arlo tries to communicate with the nonverbal Spot, and second, at the end of their journey together. Again, these scenes show us what the studio can do better than most other filmmakers by tugging at those heartstrings in unexpected yet profound moments. The drawing of a circle never felt so emotional before The Good Dinosaur.

It is, as I’ve said, good but not great – worth the watch, certainly, better than most of the animated drivel (do we need, for example, an Angry Birds movie?) ostensibly targeting the same demographic. The Good Dinosaur maintains the visual standard set by Pixar, even if the story never quite rises above the level of “serviceable.”

The Good Dinosaur is rated PG for “peril, action and thematic elements.” There are some mean dinosaurs in here, some bloodless violence involving such creatures, and a few implied dinosaur deaths.

Bonus review! The Good Dinosaur comes packaged with a delightful short named Sanjay’s Super Team. In it, Pixar displays their gift for wordless storytelling in a story about a boy whose love of superheroes comes into conflict with his father’s devout prayers, until the young Sanjay realizes the two are not wholly irreconcilable. Deeply personal, Sanjay’s Super Team is a worthy appetizer – better placed, perhaps, in front of the forthcoming Incredibles 2 – and a real treat for me, because I’m a very easy sell when it comes to both Pixar and superheroes. The video game-inflected animation is a unique addition to the Pixar canon, and its blend of family values and superheroism is over all too soon. Can we get a full-length Sanjay feature?