Forced: The New Adventures of Old Star Wars

Note: I have made no attempts to conceal spoilers in this review, so read at your own risk.

After the last three films in the Star Wars franchise, The Force Awakens had nowhere to go but up. While all the superfans were still basking in their space opera reverie from opening weekend, I managed to see an afternoon showing of the latest Star Wars. Here’s my history regarding this franchise, in a nutshell: I resisted them until 4th grade because everyone else was so into them; then I really loved them for a few years, until one of my best friends—a Star Wars devotee if ever there was one, who made Star Wars home movies with his brother—scared me straight. I wasn’t going to be that cultish about it. (There were so many other things to be cultish about.) The Force Awakens is a relatively clever and entertaining jaunt into space opera, but it hits all its predictable beats with such self-satisfaction that you know what’s coming before it happens. This is pure nostaglic giddiness on the part of director J.J. Abrams, pure “Look-at-me-getting-to-direct-a-Star-Wars-movie!” 

Nostalgia is the wind in the sails of The Force Awakens. J.J. Abrams has genuine affection for these movies, and he deftly adheres to all their idiosyncrasies. Force mirrors Star Wars (as in A New Hope) in a number of ways: it establishes new, young heroes Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega) and Poe (Oscar Isaac), a new (old) threat in the form of Han and Leia’s corrupted Jedi son Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). And now Luke Skywalker has taken on the Ben Kenobi aura of mystery, having fled civilization in despair. (His attempts to train his nephew backfired, and he feels responsible for Kylo Ren’s conversion to the Dark Side.)

Rey is essentially the new Luke Skywalker, although Finn may sort of share that credit. Rey is a scavenger living on a bleak desert planet called Jakku, where she awaits the return of her family. (It's not quite clear what happened to them.) Her existence is very Mad Max. We see her trading machine parts for food and sitting with watchful yearning (like Luke did in A New Hope) for something better to happen to her. She's pulled into the drama of Star Wars via an adorable droid named BB-8, who's carrying important information regarding Luke Skywalker's whereabouts. (Another mirror-plot checkpoint.)

Let’s remember that the original Star Wars was itself a nostalgia trip, culled by George Lucas from serials he remembered watching on Saturday mornings as a child. That makes The Force Awakens a nostalgia trip within a nostalgia trip; add to that the fact that the kids who grew up on the originals have now lived long enough to spawn their very own Star Wars-loving progeny, and you’ve essentially got third-hand mythology. That was why, about an hour into the movie, I began to pull away from it. The new characters’ stories are compelling, but Abrams cannot fully overcome the ring of familiarity. And he’s too much in love with the series to really want to, try as he might.

There are little moments of humor that really pop, and the performances of the three young leads are winning. Acting has improved so much over the years that they’re leagues ahead of Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill when they first debuted in 1977. Those three, naturally, return for this new installment, with varying degrees of screen time. (Hamill seemed like a no show for most of the film, but Abrams pays it off smartly at the end.) 

J.J. Abrams has a knack for tweaking pop culture iconography into his own re-packaged product. But I’m not sure that qualifies him as a storyteller. It’s perhaps good enough that Abrams is better than George Lucas. But as a director—of movies, particularly—Abrams is erratic. Some of the action (meaning plot development, not merely fight scenes and explosions) is well-structured, like the climactic lightsaber showdown between Rey and Kylo Ren. At other times, Abrams fails to fully set up a scene. When Rey is attacked by some stormtroopers in a marketplace, we see it from afar through the perspective of Finn. The scene doesn't really work unless we're up close, watching Rey's reaction, watching her fend off the stormtroopers, rooting for her. Of course, the purpose of putting it from Finn's perspective is to have him rush to save her, only to get there after Rey has dispensed with her attackers on her own. She doesn't need his help. It's a cool, enlightened moment for a Star Wars movie, and yet the scene doesn't totally work as structured.

Likewise, the dialogue fluctuates in quality. Abrams wisely goes for silence in two key dramatic scenes: when Rey and Leia embrace after the death of Han Solo, and when Rey hands Luke Skywalker his lightsaber at the end. It’s hard to imagine any dialogue that wouldn’t have sounded cheesy in those moments. But in other scenes, the dialogue is laboriously clunky, like a laughably bad moment when Han Solo and Leia discuss their son’s temptation to the dark side, like they’re expounding on the ingredients of a chicken soup recipe. It’s some of the worst dialogue in the movie: utterly lacking in emotional truth, and utterly functional. (Perhaps it’s an ode to George Lucas’s hackneyed dialogue.)

Pauline Kael once said that Star Wars was like a box of Cracker Jacks that was all prizes. J.J. Abrams has adopted a similar storytelling method. He doesn’t have the patience to let the weighty moments in the story be earned. They’re revealed quickly and haphazardly—like when Kylo Ren removes his mask. (Remember it took us three movies to see Darth Vador’s face.) And when the young man kills his father—the beloved Han Solo—it feels both too late and too soon. (Harrison Ford apparently wanted Lucas to kill his character off in Return of the Jedi, but Lucas balked at shooting such a dark ending.) It’s the right choice, but a misplaced one. Perhaps it should have happened in Part Two, but without Solo’s death, The Force Awakens would have no dramatic weight to it.

But despite all my quibbles, I basically enjoyed The Force Awakens, even if I was expecting more from it. It's certainly better than the previous three installments, although that's not saying much, and Abrams has potentially laid the groundwork for a really first-rate middle section just like the original trilogy did with/for Empire Strikes Back. We'll have to wait and see.

With Peter Mayhew, Anthony Daniels, Lupita Nyong’o, Domnhall Gleeson, Andy Serkis, Max Von Sydow.

Six Degrees of Richard Nixon

Three Days of the Condor, which was directed by Sidney Pollack, has at least one thing going for it: Robert Redford. Redford in his day was a terrific hippie-everyman. He was conservative enough in his demeanor to be mainstream, but progressive in his politics. But Redford loses some of his appeal when he starts to fancy himself a martyr for whatever cause his movies are about. In Three Days of the Condor, it's Robert Redford against the world, and it's a bit hard to take. I like him better when he's charming the world into compliance. 

Condor begins well: Pollack is a slick filmmaker, and the modern-jazz-funk score by Dave Grusin works for the opening shots, sounding more than a bit like the music by Weather Report from the same period. The film is set in New York, where a reader at the American Literary Historical Society named Joe Turner (Redford) is terrified to discover all of his colleagues have been gunned down while he was out to lunch. Turner pretty quickly realises that he missed death only by sheer coincidence, and that the party responsible (the CIA) isn't likely to make the same mistake twice. Soon he's hiding out in the Brooklyn Heights apartment of an icy photographer named Kathy, who's played by Faye Dunaway.

Pauline Kael criticized the casting of Dunaway as a mistake, but I'm not sure it's the casting so much as the character herself. There's a heady sort of macho intuition in the script that bungles the movie irretrievably: Turner, who's holding the terrified woman at gunpoint, looks around at her many pictures (all of them dreary black-and-white photos of autumnal trees and empty park benches: death and isolation and such) and basically pronounces her a frigid bitch. Where on earth does he get off? What's most distressing about this is that within twenty minutes of all this, they're in bed together. So I can't really fault Dunaway for what is decidedly silly writing.

Movies are supposed to be improbable, unlikely concoctions of fantasy, but this shacking up with your hostage business smacks of an improbability that only weakens the movie. Now that Kathy is on Joe's side (a new kind of putting the screws on your audience), she agrees to help him rough up a CIA desk jockey so he can find out what's really going on behind closed doors. It's depressing to realize that Dunaway had to settle for such a flat role, especially since she was one of the reigning queens of 70s cinema for a little while.

Meanwhile, Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View (released a year earlier, in 1974), is equally muddled. Warren Beatty plays a reporter who witnesses the assassination of a politician in the Space Needle. Within a few years, six people who witnessed the murder have died mysteriously, and a frantic reporter (Paula Prentiss) turns to Beatty for help because she's convinced she'll be next.

Pakula doesn't have much facility for directing action sequences. In one case, Beatty's character deflects a gunshut with a fishing rod--by wrapping the wire around the would-be shooter's legs. It's a clumsily staged moment. Pakula's better thrillers--Klute and All the President's Men--didn't have scenes like this. He's better at transmuting static material than translating physical action to the screen.

Beatty's character, also named Joe, is a prototype for the smart-ass investigative reporter that Chevy Chase played so well in Fletch. Beatty doesn't exhibit contempt for his audience, but he does imbue Joe with a certain degree of hardness to the world. He doesn't seem particularly affected by any of the disturbing things he uncovers, particularly the strange mission of the ominous Parallax Corporation, which is apparently in the business of training assassins. If only it were as clever and interesting as The Manchurian Candidate. Instead, it's a rather obvious attempt to throw some doubt on the Warren Commission's investigation of JFK's assassination. 

Of course, all of these movies are inherently connected to the Nixon Whitehouse. Without Nixon (and Vietnam), we wouldn't have likely had such an interesting spate of paranoia thrillers. (The best of them, aside from All the President's Men, are less obvious, like Philip Kaufman's terrific remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.) But has any other President spawned a whole sub-genre? These films are carriers of a Nixonian spirit that is quite unsettling and altogether fascinating. The fact that the movies themselves don't really hold up doesn't negate their relevance in the culture, because they're ultimately more interesting as reactionary objects, put forth to question authority.

The most successful movie to directly address Nixon may be, surprisingly, a kooky little Hal Ashby comedy called Shampoo, which also stars Warren Beatty. I remember watching it on television many years ago. But seeing a movie divided into segments by commercial breaks (and edited for cable) is no way to live. Shampoo is about an anomaly: a straight hairdresser who services unhappy rich women in Hollywood. (And he services them in more ways than one.) His name is George, and it's been suggested that he was inspired by Jay Sebring, the man who revolutionized men's hairstyles before being butchered by the Manson family at Sharon Tate's house in August 1969.

Shampoo is glib but sweet, and director Hal Ashby manages to make a film about unhappiness and moral decay without turning moralistic. George is bedding both the wife and the mistress of a big money businessman (Jack Warden) from whom he's hoping to finance his own salon. The ladies are both unhappy, but unwilling to forgo the various pleasures afforded by George's services. (The wife, Felicia, is played by Lee Grant, and the mistress, Jackie, is played by Julie Christie.) Meanwhile, George's official girlfriend, Jill (played by the sunny, wide-eyed Goldie Hawn, who's a willowy flower with a spark of fire inside her), is equally muddled and dissatisfied with her boyfriend. 

Warren Beatty looks perpetually stoned in Shampoo. (He looks more lucid in The Parallax View.) This is the right look for his character, a man who concludes that he's basically happy--even despite his career failings--because he gets to sleep with a lot of women. We feel for George, genuinely, when he's left alone at the end, a consequence of prior indecision.

Shampoo is set during Election Day and Night 1968, and at the end, we see actual footage of Nixon making his victory speech. It's easy to see how he won in `68--a slick and skilled politician playing against someone his own age, Hubert Humphrey--despite a blistering loss in 1960 to the suave John Kennedy. Shampoo thus signals the death knell of the Peace and Love Moment. It was, after all, Nixon and Manson who signaled it. 

Hannah and Her Sisters

Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) has a lot going for it: winning performances by Mia Farrow, Michael Caine, Barbara Hershey, Dianne Wiest, Maureen O’Sullivan, and Max von Sydow; a wonderful soundtrack of jazz music that almost deflates the problems of the people in the movie; and a surprisingly grimy portrayal of New York City. To my recollection, it didn’t have any wide shots of the Big Apple, and most of the times the city is shown under a gloomy grey sky or at night, making many of the larger, dirty old buildings seem forlorn and almost Victorian in their gloom, as if they were exported from a Dickens novel about poor people. It feels like a more honest depiction of living in a big city, especially New York in the 80s.

But there is one lovely scene of New York in which Michael Caine—who’s fallen in love with his sister-in-law, Lee (played by Barbara Hershey)—goes with her to a bookstore. Caine retrieves a volume of poems by e.e. cummings and buys it for Lee, insisting that she read the poem on page 112. (Later, we hear a voice-over of Lee reading it, and it’s one of the loveliest moments in the film.) That bookstore was truly heavenly with all those books stacked up, up, up and everywhere. And the romantic complications of Caine and Hershey’s unanticipated love for each other are dealt with relatively lightly, which is a good instinct on the part of Woody Allen.

Woody Allen in many of ways was my biggest problem with Hannah and Her Sisters, and yet, he’s also responsible for much of the good in this very charming, very amusing, film. Allen plays Mickey, the ex-husband of the title character Hannah (Mia Farrow). Micky is the usual Allen type: neurotic, obsessive, whiny, hypochondriacal. And he grates on the nerves in the usual Allen way. But there are some funny bits that he very generously gives himself. For instance, after various medical tests Mickey believes that he’s dying, but when CAT-scan results prove the opposite, he’s left with the reality that eventually, he will die, and that life is rendered meaningless in the light of this fact, especially if there is no God. Mickey, born and raised a Jew, then begins a spiritual quest that leads him to the Catholic Church for a time, and then to the Hare Krishnas for an even shorter time.

But Mickey’s story, which is interwoven with the stories of Hannah, her sister Lee (Hershey), and her other sister, a struggling actress named Holly (Dianne Wiest), is self-indulgent. Although it is funny some of the time, it’s also a constant reminder of the director’s arrogance. Why does it have to be about Woody Allen all the time? Hannah and Her Sisters really shines in some moments, but Mickey’s constant whining about the meaning of life sometimes feels like a buzz kill.

Still, there are so many lovely moments in Hannah and Her Sisters that it’s difficult to dislike the movie just because of the Mickey scenes and their tendency to grate on one’s nerves. Maureen O’Sullivan (mother of Mia Farrow in real life) is another highlight, playing the three sisters’ mom, who still likes to flirt with young men and drinks too much at parties (a tricky combination). She and her husband (played by Lloyd Nolan) have an argument somewhere in the second half of the movie, but it all melts away when he sits down and plays the piano. There’s a scene shortly after at a Thanksgiving gathering they’re hosting, where he sort of introduces his wife by telling a story about her from when they were dating: the men used to be so distracted by her beauty, they would drive their cars into the sidewalk. She smiles and then he plays the piano some more. How lovely that a man can recall such flattering memories of his wife and make her the star of the show with just his words.

Hannah and Her Sisters ends on a problematic note: Mickey begins dating Holly, the failed-actress-turned-struggling-writer, and after they’re married she announces that she’s pregnant. It’s as if Woody Allen was the secret to happiness, because after she writes a play and reads it to him, they begin dating. It seems quite clear that her attraction to him is based on his lavish praise of her writing. (Earlier, the movie shows us a date between them years before where they did not hit it off and vowed to themselves never to see each other again.) It feels phony and hampers the film, which up to that point, at least tries to deal honestly with relationships.

With Carrie Fisher, Julie Kavner, Daniel Stern, Sam Waterston, and Julia Louis Dreyfus. 

Shutter Island

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Somehow I missed seeing Shutter Island in theaters, where it must have been all the more exciting to experience. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a marshal who journeys, by ferry, to a foreboding island off the New England coast, called Shutter Island. On it is an ominous facility that functions as a lunatic asylum, run by the calm, collected, and creepy Dr. Cawley (played with stiff, serene menace by Ben Kingsley). DiCaprio, along with his partner (Mark Ruffalo), has come to help locate an escaped patient. The people on Shutter Island are totally deranged, so it's a dangerous situation. Director Martin Scorsese is intent on keeping you on edge from start to finish. However, I found myself almost completely relaxed. I enjoyed the plot and how it unraveled, and there were suspenseful moments, but there wasn't the unbearable tension and anticipation you might expect from a movie like this. At least, I didn't feel it.

Perhaps it's because from the word go I was expecting some kind of bizarre, shocking plot twist. We've--audiences--been conditioned to expect such things. I think modern audiences can look back to The Sixth Sense as the moment we were so embarrassingly (or pleasurably?) fooled by a movie. Of course, it's been done dozens of times before, but in recent movie memory that is the movie that stands out for sheer tom-foolery. Hitchcock did it with Psycho. More recently than that, Jonathan Demme did it at the end of The Silence of the Lambs.

Audiences these days seem to fancy themselves uber-sophisticated when it comes to figuring thrillers out before they reveal themselves to us, yet desperately in need of the kind of movie that takes us along for the ride and completely dupes us. Thrillers, in that sense, deliver the most visceral and exciting experience that we get from movies. We love stories because we love watching them unfold, and the suspense makes the work of an audience member akin to the work of a detective, fetching clues and trying to make guesses about the outcomes, the motivations, and the mysteries, of movies. This must offer at least a partial explanation for how well horror movies--even dumb ones--do at the box office.

A thriller is almost a sure thing as far as making money is concerned, especially if you can get Leonardo DiCaprio to star and Martin Scorsese to direct. Scorsese piles on the atmosphere here, and yet the movie has stark, rich colors to it, colors you don't typically find in a dark and eerie suspense yarn. He goes against that film noir dark-alley quality. Even the scenes in usually dimly lit places are disturbingly well-lit. DiCaprio lights a match that might as well be a spotlight. It never seems to burn out, either.

The opening shot looks obviously computer-generated, though, and that's one of the things modern movies struggle to fight. Filmmakers may save a lot of money to construct the scene virtually, but there's often a phoniness to the scene that floats to the surface, and you wonder how the actors can really trick themselves into believing they're on a real boat and a real ocean. But, for all that, the opening shot also retains a noirish quality, thanks mainly to the costumes. DiCaprio and Ruffalo wearing their hats and their trenchcoats look like two separate Dana Andrews in Laura. They're bound and determined to figure out the mystery that confronts them, but then the movie takes on a sort of Key Largo turn: a magnificent storm disarms the asylum's security system and the inmates start wandering about. All of them are homicidal maniacs (or very close), we're told.

If Shutter Island doesn't blow anyone out of the water, at least it's refreshing to see Scorsese making a movie that's just out to entertain you. He's not trying to do something important and Oscar-worthy like that awful mess The Aviator, or even The Departed, which finally got him what many considered a long-overdue Academy Award. The movie is a hallucinatory mess of a good time, nowhere near as bloated as the misfired Christopher Nolan movie Inception. It's just a crackling, old-fashioned thriller. From the novel by Dennis Lehane. The supporting cast is appropriately nightmarish: Max Von Sydow, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley, and John Carroll Lynch.

Robin Hood

Russell Crowe and director Ridley Scott reunite for a rousing update of ROBIN HOOD. Your trusty reviewer doesn't usually go for epic movies, but is willing to put a little trust in the hands of the director of ALIEN and the star of L.A. CONFIDENTIAL. Cate Blanchett makes for a strong but soft Maid Marian, who agrees to give aid to the illusion that Robin Longstride (Crowe) is her dead husband Robin of Loxley returning from 10 years battle (in order to keep her land and ensure the livelihood of the many subjects who work it). But trouble is afoot, within and without England, as the sleazy King John (Oscar Isaac) sees little value in the liberty of his subjects, but must depend upon their fighting skills to save England from being overtaken by the French, led by his backstabbing chum Godfrey (Mark Strong). William Hurt as a British chancellor and Max von Sydow as Marian's ailing but noble father-in-law lend just the right amount of British upper-custiness to this swirling epic, a tale that proves it is worth retelling, particularly in light of 1991's ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES and its notoriously appalling casting choice of Kevin Costner in the lead. Audiences may determine if a sequel is in order (there's certainly room for more, provided they do as good as this one). With Mark Addy (as Friar Tuck), Danny Huston, Eileen Atkins, Matthew MacFadyen, Kevin Durand, and Scott Grimes. ★★★½

The Exorcist

Thanks to Netflix, I was able to satisfy my desire to revisit The Exorcist (1973), the shocker that caused quite a furor upon its theatrical release, where apparently some viewers couldn't handle its subject matter. Adapted by William Peter Blatty from his bestselling novel (based on actual events of an alleged case of possession, although the sex of the child was changed from a boy to a girl for Blatty's version), and directed by William Friedkin, The Exorcist has garnered a lot of intense debate over the course of its now 37 years of existence: is it groundbreaking, the most terrifying movie ever made, or just simply sick and twisted? Well, maybe a little of everything.

I certainly recommend viewing of this movie only for those with strong stomachs and more importantly strong appetites for supernatural horror. If you actually believe in a spiritual realm, The Exorcist is all the more unsettling, because it bores through the security of 20th century modern America (or, in our case, 21st-century). Much as Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula took the pulse of an end-of-century London that felt superior in its civilized-ness and technological advancement, The Exorcist offers the chilling possibility that all that we see is not all there is, and that forces exist beyond our explanation or control.

Of course 20th-century Catholicism, at least through the lens of this movie, is just as cynical as the rest of the civilized world, and a troubled, spiritually doubting priest named Father Karras (Jason Miller) becomes the last resort of an actress named Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), whose daughter Regan (Linda Blair) has undergone an inexplicably bizarre change in her personality.

Having exhausted all the scientific and psychological remedies, MacNeil goes against her better judgment in the effort to save her daughter, who's become possessed: she's violent, given to levitation, and rather foul-mouthed, too.

The Exorcist is so cleanly put together, so professionally done, that its technical impressiveness and dramatic "maturity" must have had the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in a tizzy. After all, they'd never had to nominate horror pictures for major Oscars like Best Picture, Director, Actress and Adapted Screenplay before. So despite the fact that The Exorcist may have become dated or altogether relegated to its time period of the 1970s (many people associate the decade with lots of good, important movies, myself included, so this isn't necessarily a negative point), it may deserve more points than we've given it for demonstrating the credibility of horror as a genre, and not just one made to entertain people in some primitive way.

 On the other hand, it's probably true that people flocked to see this movie more than anything because of its sensationalism. The horrible things 12-year-old Regan does to herself, the impressively grotesque make-up effects and the way she spins her head around, the myriad demonic voices (created in part with the talents of actress Mercedes McCambridge), and of course the green vomit, are nothing but sensationalistic. It's a mixture of "high," "sophisticated" 70's drama (at times Burstyn reaches delightful levels of histrionics) and Grand Guignol of the ickiest nature.

Max von Sydow, in a pivotal role at the end (and briefly at the beginning) as the starchy-white old exorcist, has a wonderful line in reference to the demon--or Devil--inside Blair: "He will mix the truth with lies to confuse us." I thought it was wonderful. The music is also noteworthy, particularly Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" but also the creepy strings used throughout.

Overall, The Exorcist might be worth seeing if you have an interest in demonic possession and want to see it Hollywoodized 1970's style, or if you're in the mood for spine-tingling thrills mixed with moments of unexpected laughter. Sometimes when the devil speaks you can't do anything but laugh. If you want something a little less graphic but still quite fascinating, try 2005's The Exorcism of Emily Rose with Laura Linney and Tom Wilkinson.

With Lee J. Cobb, Kitty Winn, and Jack MacGowran. ★★★½