What's Happening in this Ocean's 8 Promo?

Yesterday Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures released the first image of the forthcoming "Ocean's 8", a sequel of sorts to the Steven Soderbergh's "Oceans" trilogy in which several of Hollywood's most in-demand leading men portrayed a gang of debonair thieves, which was itself a spinoff to a 1960s cinematic excuse for the Rat Pack to hang out. There are legitimate debates to be had about a male being tapped to direct this all-female enterprise (I would have selected Mimi Leder - let's get her back in the game), and there are other debates to be had about whether or not women would be better to focus their voices on more original material.

Still, it's pretty boss to see all those women on screen in a subway car at the same time. And seeing them all on that subway car at the same time inevitably leads to me imagining an alternate dimension where they are not all necessarily in the same movie together but merely eight women taking the subway.

Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett are totally two Real Housewives of NYC who are currently feuding. Sandra Bullock is the Bethenny Frankel. Cate Blanchett is the Kelly Killoren Bensimon.

Sarah Paulson is a businesswoman who was sitting there on her way to work when Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett entered the train while arguing about who first came up with the idea for a guava & oxygen flavored wine cooler. Now Sarah Paulson is just trying not to make eye contact.

Helena Bonham Carter is Sandra Bullock's personal security.

Anne Hathaway is transfixed by a subway ad for MCI, which she thought had been bought out long ago by Verizon. "Is MCI making a comeback?" Hathaway wonders in an internal monolouge. "Or has that ad just been up there since, like, 1987?"

Rihanna is wondering what the hell is up with Hathaway's green snakeskin jacket.

Awkwafina is wondering what the hell's up with the whole lot of 'em. I mean, I know Awkwafina gets the worst seat in the subway car, but I assume that's because she stepped on, heard the Real Housewives feuding and sat down as far away from them as possible.

Mindy Kaling chose to stand, only to get tossed about every time the train lurches to a stop. Still, once you've chosen to stand on the subway when there are seats available, you can't sit down. That's public transit surrender, an admittance that you erred in remaining on your feet. Nope, she will continue clinging to that handrail, thank you, even though 45 seconds after this picture she falls on her face.

Some Drivel On...Million Dollar Baby

I have never been satisfied with anything I have written about "Million Dollar Baby." On the 12th anniversary of the greatest moviegoing experience of my life, I tried again.

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When we meet Maggie Fitzgerald, aspirant welterweight women’s champion of the world, we do not see her, not exactly, because we see what she sees, a point-of-view shot rushing forward toward a boxing arena. Then the camera flips and Maggie, shrouded in shadows, steps out of those shadows in a silent whoosh, the kind that flutters your heart before you know what hit it, from the dark into the light.

That’s where much of “Million Dollar Baby” takes place – in the spaces between dark and light. You see it in the immediate aftermath of this introductory shot, as Maggie walks with boxing trainer Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood), cheerily begging for him to train her, in a hallway barely illuminated by creaky overhead lights, marching into and back out of shadows.

You can't have light without darkness, of course, as the saying goes, a pedantic one perhaps, but that is given extraordinary meaning in "Million Dollar Baby", where its characters spend many daylight hours in the sweaty comfort of the Hit Pit gym that Frankie owns, hitting speed bags and trading barbs, but where the real emotional gristle can only be found in the dark, whether late night hours in the gym after everyone has gone or in a hospital room late in the movie where even Maggie doesn't give in to the dark by counterpunching fate. "Million Dollar Baby" is a boxing movie, yes, but it is also a character-centric movie, underlined by its myriad nighttime shots where only characters seem to fill the frame.

These characters are familiar. Maggie is a hopeful pugilist who lost her father, the only person who really ever loved her, long ago. Frankie just drove away a boxer who was his best shot for a title and drove away his daughter long ago. It only makes narrative sense that they unite, professionally and personally, becoming protege and mentor, surrogate daughter and surrogate father. And then there is Scrap Dupris (Morgan Freeman), ostensibly the gym's manager but really the story's scribe, on hand to observe the proceedings and record them for posterity, revealed in the closing shot where he is writing a letter to Frankie's daughter, after Frankie has disappeared into the ether, who has presumably sought her father out. That reveal adds depth to re-watches of "Million Dollar Baby" and cancels out objections of plausibility.

"Million Dollar Baby" is viewed through the eyes of Scrap who is viewing the story through the prism of time, rendering it as something like a fable, evoked in the boxer who Maggie inevitably meets for the championship of the world. That opponent is nicknamed The Blue Bear, which sounds like something out of an ancient gaelic myth, and is why The Blue Bear's highly (obviously) illegal methods might not pass muster in terms of traditional plot holes but are excused in this re-telling. Scrap is heightening for effect, yet also excusing elements that don't concern his story, whether it is what becomes of The Blue Bear or why the fawning public that is occasionally hinted at as Maggie achieves roaring success is never really glimpsed. Scrap limits his tale to the main players, which he weaves with a gravelly poetry.

This intimacy is evoked in Eastwood's famously frugal direction. The training montage is a staple of these sorts of films, but when it arrives here, as it must, after Maggie has convinced Frankie to take her on as a pupil, its presentation is not only low-key rather than rah rah, underlined by Eastwood’s minimal, almost mournful, score, but presented not as the hero's assemblage of her superpowers but as the forming of a bond. This bond is further evinced in dialogue exchangers where the two become like boxers sparring outside the ring, dancing around one another.

The best scenes in the movie often involve that byplay, like the ways in which Maggie sunnily tests Frankie's exasperated patience, transforming that patented Eastwood squint into a comic reaction rather than an impending threat. In an early scene, Maggie shows up at the Hit Pit, trying, once again, to earn Frankie's help, repeatedly calling him "Boss", which he can't stand.

"If I stop calling you 'boss' will you train me?"
"No."
"Then I may as well keep calling you it."

That last line is perfect. It's a choppy sentence, concluding in an ill-placed "it", which is why it sounds just right, like something Maggie Fitzgerald of the Missouri Ozarks would say, and which Swank has Maggie say so incredulously. Frankie and Scrap's numerous exchanges, meanwhile, were not included in the original stories by F.X. Toole because in those original stories the characters' respective narratives were split up. So, screenwriter Paul Haggis invented their dialogue, transforming them into longtime friends whose friendliness often reveals itself through comic antagonizing, underlined by the deadpan reactions of the two old acting pros. After one verbal round, Frankie tells Scrap to "get the hell out of my office", which Scrap does, but watch Freeman in this moment and how he has his character give a little "Well, what do you want me to do?" shrug that then gives way to humored smile.

Often the back and forths between Frankie and Scrap relate directly to the gym's finances, whether it is members paying their dues or splurging for brand name bleach. Indeed, there is a lot of talk of money in "Million Dollar Baby", not in a get rich away but an economically anxious way, with Frankie chastising Scrap for buying brand name bleach and imploring Maggie to set aside savings. Indeed, while Haggis might overdo Maggie's "trash" roots, there are moments when her scrounging for every penny truly hits home, like the shot at her dinner table where she spills out an entire jar of change onto her table and rifles through it. This shot is lit just by a dingy lamp, which makes her look like some desperate prospector from a bygone era.

At first glance, Swank's character is not filled with grand dimension because what she is what she's going after. The script tries to fill that out with her family, but Haggis's gravest writing misstep is making Maggie's family so gruesomely monstrous that they veer into caricature, one of the details I overlooked on my first experience with the movie because I was so far gone into it but that plainly sticks out on re-watches. But what also sticks out is the way Swank fills out Maggie with a humility that is at odds with her fearsome presence in the ring.

Consider the moment early in the film, before Frankie agrees to tutor her and when he is still overseeing Big Willie, the future champ. Maggie stands and watches Frankie and Big Willie work; Frankie catches her watching them; Maggie lowers her head, embarrassed,

Swank plays Maggie as fiercely earnest and earnestly fierce, no in-between, not so much repressing the gruesome past of her family, or even having gotten past, but simply, to quote Lloyd Dobler, deciding to be in a good mood. She does not allow that demeanor to drain away in the final act, where a horrific injury leaves her paralyzed, not even in the eventual deathbed scenes, which would have been such an easy choice, but to actually maintain the fierce earnestness she's had all along. The decision to take her own life, and to ask Frankie to do it, while inevitably politicized, is strictly personal.

Yet because in her paralysis she unable to end her life on her own, she asks for Frankie's help, making the decision personal for him too, leaving him in a moral bind, as the narrative gives itself almost entirely over to him. If Maggie has brought him into the light, ending her life will send him re-plunging into darkness, which is where the movie ends, as Eastwood's closing shot mimics an earlier shot set at a roadside diner, only this time with the windows fogged, as if what we are seeing is not reality but a hazy dream, a dream in which he be left to wander for an eternity.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

I am not a Trekkie, I am not a sci-fi guy at all, and yet, long before I became a cinephile scanning the Turner Classic Movies menu daily, sci-fi was helping me form motion picture taste. Like “Star Wars” instilled in me upon further review a love of Warner Bros.-ish 1930s B movies, “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” instilled in me upon further review a love of screwball comedies. That’s what the movie is, or, more accurately, that’s what the movie becomes, after an opening act we will discuss momentarily, when an enormous space probe threatens 23rd century Earth by evaporating its oceans and enclosing the planet in darkness by blocking the sun all in a futile attempt to re-open communication with humpback whales that have, alas, long ago gone extinct. With the present sans humpback whales, the only way to find a few is for the crew of the Starship Enterprise to go back in time, to the late 20th century, 1986 to be exact, necessarily coinciding with the release date, which becomes as much a portal from spacey seriousness to earthbound comedy, underlined by the conversation in which the complications and absurdity of time travel are joyously breached with a casual kinda hey, why not, whatever.

McCoy: “You're going to try time traveling in this rust bucket?”
Kirk: “We’ve done it before.”

If Spock gifted Kirk a copy of “A Tale of Two Cities” in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” then he might have opened the fourth film by gifting his old friend a copy of The Howard Hawks Collection, given how “The Voyage Home’s” second act, in which our principal gang becomes fish out of water in 80s San Francisco, is rendered with an immaculate blend of knowing, self-effacing and vintage hammy comedy. The film was directed by Leonard Nimoy and he graciously divvies up comic moments to most everyone, even if he saves the majority of them, as is necessary, for Kirk and Spock. So comfortable in one another’s presence on screen, Shatner’s inherent pompousness is nimbly employed as Kirk becomes a self-appointed know-nothing tour guide of a strange world while Nimoy plays the bumfuzzled straight man to the hilarious hilt. Why they even skillfully make room, briefly, for a third member of their comic team in the person of Catherine Hicks, who plays the semi-love interest of Kirk, a heroic marine biologist who leads the two time-travelers to the needed whales, and whose incredulousness at Kirk and Spock is sidesplitting, evinced most ably in the stellar sequence in the front seat of Gillian’s truck where she humors these “the hard luck cases” and Nimoy the director simply allows the byplay, behavior and reaction shots to do all the heavy lifting.

“Star Trek IV” took its crew back to the present day, of course, because it would be humorous for audiences to see the crew of the Starship Enterprise in a modern context, communicating in a language where swearing is not only commonplace but imperative, compelled to lean on Reaganomics rather than Trekonomics. The film, however, was just as driven by one of our more noble isms. 1986 was still very much in the midst of Morning in America™, which meant consumerism superseded environmentalism, and the makers of “Star Trek IV” had seen enough. Tying the 23rd century’s potential doom explicitly back to the 20th, where mankind, as the film’s dialogue tell us, had hunted the humpback whales to extinction, was an eco-friendly invocation to its audience. And as funny as the rest of the movie might be, Nimoy treats this plotline with impressive earnestness, delivering laughs and thoughtfulness in equal measure, transforming entertainment into a statement.

I keep thinking about “Star Trek IV”, not just because its 30 year anniversary was recently observed, but because my new American government is hell bent on teleporting us back to the 1980s, where consumerism trumps (ha!) environmentalism, as if every lesson Nimoy sought to impart in his film has been blithely dismissed. I keep thinking about how the kids of our kids of our kids will be left to fit the bill, potentially leaving them like the those in “Star Trek IV”, unknowingly at the mercy of their anti-environmentalist forefathers. I keep thinking about how future earthlings may not have the benefit of time travel or cutesy hijinks to save them.

I keep thinking about this scene in the underratedly ominous opening act of “Star Trek IV”, in which the blotting out of this blue planet for its past sins is imminent, where Sarek (Mark Lenard), Spock’s father, who is always around to be wise, enters Starfleet headquarters, to converse with President of the United Federation of the Planets (Robert Ellenstein). I keep thinking about how Nimoy sets the shot with Sarek and the President in front of this window being pounded by rain, shrouded in gray darkness, underlining how there is no way out, fatalistically trying to reason with a probe whose language to their ears is gibberish. I keep thinking of the melancholy in their movements and the pessismism in their voices. I keep thinking about Sarek’s faint plea to the Federation President. I cannot, try as I might, prevent that plea from echoing in my mind.

“Perhaps you should transmit a planetary distress signal...while we still have time.”

Retroactively Bestowing the Annual Scarlett O'Hara Curtain Dress Award

Astute readers, or longtime readers frustrated by our unceasing commitment to asinine bits, may have noticed that in our un-heralded Random Awards, in which we bestow awards to some of the random tidbits of cinema in the preceding year that most tickled our peculiar fancy, which are not really random at all since we do most of them annually, that the Annual Scarlett O'Hara Curtain Dress Award, presented to our favorite piece of cinematic clothing of the year, was not given. It was not given because, well, despite re-combing through the myriad movies we had seen in 2016, no individual bit of costume design had truly, to paraphrase Q-Tip, sizzled our retinas. That, as it turns out, was because we had yet to see "20th Century Women" and therefore had yet to see Greta Gerwig's jacket, which we now officially name as 2016's Annual Scarlett O'Hara Curtain Dress Award winner.

Photo Credit: Hollywood Movie Costumes and Props, as seen here

keira knightley wearing a hat

It's dark out there, friends. It's real dark. And while we are typically compelled in times of such darkness to share an image of Keira Knightley, this blog's official cinematic crush, in a hat in order to brighten the mood, well, times are so dark that no brightening the mood was possible. No, this is the only Keira Knightley In A Hat image that'll do.....

Some Drivel On...the Oscar Nominations

All right, let’s do this.

Ah, Oscar Nomination Day, where for every Take there is an equal and opposite Re-Take. If you think a Best Picture nominee is good, someone else will argue it’s crap; if you think a Best Picture nominee is crap, someone else will argue it’s good. If you think someone got snubbed, someone else will tell you that snubs are just a myth propagated by the Awards Show Loving bourgeois; if you think it’s an honor just to be nominated, someone else will say “Susan Lucci.” If you think awards are nonsense, someone else will argue the Oscars are a cultural snapshot; if you think the Oscars are a cultural snapshot, someone else will argue awards are cultural propaganda you goddam sheeple! Nobody knows anything, as William Goldman once posited, except, of course, William Goldman forgot that even as nobody knows anything simultaneously everyone knows everything. Thus, Cinema Romantico wades into the nominations to try and make sense where, in all likelihood, there is none, outside of Hollywood machinations, which are occur behind literal and figurative closed doors where I may not go. So here goes. (All nominations can be found here.)

The 2015/16 Oscars will forever be branded as #OscarsSoWhite, meaning that the run-up to the 2016/17 Oscars would be studied closely as a potential corrective. That issue, as many people have noted, like my man Michael Mann, has less to do with nominees than the guts, so to speak, of the industry, and if there were to be a corrective this go-around, it may not be a corrective at all, but merely a temporary response. But we don’t have time right now to wait and see; we have to tell you like it is (even if it might not be at all). So, how is it?

The Best Picture nominees check in at 9, including the predominantly white, if quite good, “Manchester by the Sea” and the also quite good “Arrival”, where humankind is saved by two white people (even if one of the white people is a woman). But there is also the majestic, all-black and fantastic, from acting & directing on down to production design & music supervision, “Moonlight”; there is the all-African American “Fences”; there is “Hidden Figures”, which recounts the Untold Story of NASA’s black women. “Lion”, meanwhile, reaches out globally, while even “Hell or High Water”, which allowed for many economically anxious white people, also made space for a Native American character to espouse that, hey, his people got screwed first.

Then again, these films, and “Hacksaw Ridge”, generally fit the standard Academy prestige pedigree to tee (though “Hell or High Water” does trend a little more genre-y and “Moonlight” is pretty indie-y) just as “La La Land” does, which racked up the most nominations of any movie and will likely become the so-called front-runner, which means it will be exhaustively defended by its champions and relentlessly attacked by its adversaries, which is basically where every Oscar race winds up. It’s always tempting to view Best Picture nominees as some societal commentary, but really it’s just the Academy taking stock of how society presently views them and doing their best to respond accordingly. You could say “Deadpool” got snubbed, but if this was post-“Dark Knight” Didn’t Get Nominated Oscars, I am reasonably certain that “Deadpool” would have been one of the nine. The Academy, in other words, is less reactionary than simply reactive. I sincerely hope this push for diversity continues in the future, but we will have to wait and see.

In other nominations:

Best Director: Denis Villeneuve’s nod for “Arrival”suggests a willingness to go international, even if it’s an American film, and while Kenneth Lonergan is doing more in “Manchester by the Sea” then pointing and shooting, he deserves an Oscar most for Best Original Screenplay. This category seems “La La Land’s” 32 year old whiz kid Damien Chazelle’s to lose with “Moonlight’s” Barry Jenkins snapping at his heels. Mel Gibson, meanwhile, director of “Hacksaw Ridge”, now has two more nominations and one more actual Oscar than Kelly Reichardt, not that I’m bitter, not that I’m bitter at all.

Best Actress: Based on nothing but my own whims, I had pegged this year’s Best Actress race as a foregone conclusion, an “It’s Her Time” Oscar for Annette Bening in “20th Century Women”, which is not at all fair to the actual performance Bening gives because it is not merely of the “It’s Her Time” ilk but a finely textured bit of lived-in business that truly deserved all on its own merit to finally make it Bening’s time. Alas, Ms. Bening was shut out. While people are already saying Ruth Negga’s wonderfully restrained turn in “Loving” edged out Bening (and Amy Adams for “Arrival”), I blame this oversight on Meryl Streep. After all, the Academy has grandfathered in Meryl Streep’s nomination and so, once again, for the 59th straight year, dating back to 1957, Ms. Streep is nominated for Best Actress. I’d name the movie but it hardly matters. The movie could be anything. It could be “Speed 3: Autopilot.” And the thing is, I’m sure Meryl, a class act, knows it too. So it is. It could now instead be Isabelle Huppert’s “time”, fresh off her Golden Globes win for “Elle” and now nominated for the Academy Award too. But I don’t think so. Nope, I think this will be Emma Stone for “La La Land”, a classic case of a Cutting In Line Oscar (as in, while Annette and Isabelle and Amy keep waiting in line, Emma cuts right in front of them to collect her statue first).

Best Actor: Casey Affleck earned his second Oscar nomination and this time enters as the clear-cut favorite for his admittedly agonizing, inward performance in “Manchester by the Sea.” This could have been a walkover, so good is Affleck the actor, except that Affleck the person might not be such a good guy as the cloud of sexual assault allegations he settled out of court suggest. There is no character clause, as far as I know, when it comes to Academy voting, but Oscar races are (too) long and the media will stir up more “noise”, to use Affleck’s word, about his past and maybe it will matter, maybe it will not, maybe Denzel Washington (“Fences”) or Ryan Gosling (“La La Land”) or Andrew Garfield (“Hacksaw Ridge”) will benefit which seems like a weird word to use in this context. And that is why this category makes me yearn to follow Viggo Mortensen of “Captain Fantastic” (who earned the Honorary Bryan Cranston “Trumbo” Wait, Who Actually Saw That? nomination) into the wilderness and away from all this mess.

Best Supporting Actress / Best Supporting Actor: One of the fun (funny) things about Academy Awards nominations is how easily we will skew our belief systems, so to speak, in the name of our favorites. Viola Davis is the front-runner for the former for “Fences” while Mahershala Ali, despite his loss at the Golden Globes, is the front-runner for the latter for “Moonlight.” These would not be tokenish We-See-You wins post-#OscarsSoWhite either. Both those wins would be deserved and I would be happy for them. 

Still, while I quibble for Meryl Streep’s Grandfathered Nomination, I adore Nicole Kidman’s semi-Grandfathered Nomination, because I’m biased in her favor and I don’t hide my biases, and I was overjoyed she got the nod for “Lion” because I subscribe to the notion in my advancing age that the Academy Awards are just One Big Show and the show would be less fun without Nicole Kidman. And if every Oscar Nomination morning brings at least one Holy S*** moment, this year, for me, it was Michael Shannon, who did the heavy lifting in “Nocturnal Animals” in one of the best performances of the year, getting a nod. Imagining a Michael Shannon acceptance speech will be enough to get me through the next month of Oscar race smack talk in which awards autocrats tell everyone else to stop being so imperious. That, and dreaming of Michael Shannon as his character in “Nocturnal Animals” hosting the Academy Awards with Jimmy Kimmel.

JIMMY KIMMEL: “Couldn’t you laugh at, like, one of my jokes?”
MICHAEL SHANNON: “Wish I could.”

See you February 26th.

Paterson

Jim Jarmusch’s “Paterson” begins with an overhead shot of the titular character (Adam Driver) and his wife Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) asleep in bed. Paterson wakes, looks at his watch and climbs out of bed to begin his routine, and as he comes up from his slumber, it is almost as if we, the audience, go under, vanishing into a waking dream. Jarmusch has always made movies that feel like dreams, whether it was the hallucinatory frontier journey of “Dead Man” or the nocturnal vampire romance of “Only Lovers Left Alive”, but “Paterson” builds its unassuming fantasy out of the most unlikely ingredient – the everyday. In cinema, the everyday is often something to be feared or escaped from, an allegorical death sentence just weighing you down. In “Paterson”, Jarmusch re-claims the everyday by honing in on its innate lyricism, and allowing that lyricism to quietly lift up his main character.

Paterson lives in Paterson (New Jersey), where he drives a bus Monday through Friday, moonlighting as a poet, heavily inspired, it seems, by William Carlos Williams, who composed five volume poem published over 12 years titled Paterson. These are not coincidences, of course, but the circular rhythms of life, glimpsed just as acutely in Paterson’s nightly walk with his English Bulldog Marvin, in the shape of the Cheerios Paterson favors for breakfast, even in the designs his wife dreams up for new curtains or wears on her dresses. In the protagonist’s rigid routine, which we follow along with for a period of one week, Jarmusch allows a kind of cinematic poem, written in seven stanzas to emerge, as ennui becomes emotional sustenance and artistic fuel for life.

Adam Driver evokes an almost preternatural placidity, in the way he sits, in the way he talks, in the way he drives the bus. Even when his character momentarily is enlisted as a hero, of sorts, he remains rather unruffled. He just sort of allows Paterson to exist in the spaces between everyone else, as they, and everything around them, become his objects of study. At the corner bar, Jarmusch’s camera looks on as Paterson looks over the room, as if filing everything away. At his kitchen counter, one moment finds him closely studying the shape of his wife’s homemade drapes. Nothing gets past him. On the bus, where he overhears passenger conversation, Driver has Paterson listen with a small smile, grateful not simply for the material but for the way in which these conversations are small talk about something.

Laura repeatedly urges him to publish the poems he compiles in a cherished notebook. In another movie this might have become the driving plot element. But there are no driving plot elements in “Paterson”, not really, as occasionally Jarmusch even winks at the notion of standard stakes, like in a bar patron cum jilted lover who waves around a gun in a scene where the tension is suddenly, comically diffused when the gun turns out to be a fake. Laura espouses her own dreams throughout, ranging from opening a cupcake business to becoming a country music star, but while Paterson is happy to hear her dreams out, he has none of his own, content in what he has, tangibly and esoterically. He writes:

I knock off work,
have a beer at the bar.
I look down at the glass,
and feel glad.

That Jarmusch superimposes the poetry over the screen as Paterson scribbles it does not come across as some needless device but an evocation of how Paterson takes what he sees, in the place around him, in his own life, and contextualizes it through his poetry. It’s not a hobby or even an aspiring profession but a part of him, a running diary in verse. You see this idea acutely in a brief encounter Paterson has at a laundromat, where a nameless man, played by the rapper Method Man, is washing and drying and folding even as he workshops a rap alone. It’s “Paterson” in full – taking something as boring as doing the laundry and wresting poetry from it.

“I breathe poetry.” That’s what the Japanese Poet (Masatoshi Nagase) says that sits down on a bench next to Paterson. He has come to Paterson to pay homage to the inspiration for William Carlos Williams. This arrives at a particularly delicate moment for Paterson, when his poetry notebook, for reasons not to be disclosed, goes M.I.A. In these sequences, the politeness exuding from Adam Driver’s performance ever so slightly teeters. And when the Japanese Poet asks Paterson if he is a poet, Paterson says no, citing his job as a bus driver. But the Japanese Poet can sense better, gifting Paterson a new notebook. This, like everything else, is not a coincidence but part and parcel to the annular shape of “Paterson” and, by extension. life itself, allowing Paterson’s circle to remain unbroken. He puts pen to paper and starts to write.

Southside with You

“Southside with You” is undoubtedly different from any normal cinematic Presidential biography. It is not a summation of a whole Presidency or an in-depth treatise on a President’s defining event. It is not even something like, say, 1940’s “Abe Lincoln in Illinois”, which chronicled the titular legend’s time preceding the Presidency. No, “Southside with You” is a snapshot of a pre-political fray President as director Richard Tanne presents Obama (Parker Sawyers) simply as Barack, not a leader or even a future leader but a guy still trying to figure himself out. And he is helped considerably in that process by Michelle Robinson (Tika Sumpter) as Tanne frames his movie with the first date, so to speak, of Barack and Michelle in something like a Southside version of “Before Sunrise”, right down to the closing shots that cast them apart post-date sitting down to marinate in the memory of what just happened.

The pesky requisite stakes, like “Before Sunrise”, remain wondrously modest, stemming from Barack and Michelle, working together at a Chicago law firm, trying to decide whether their getting together to attend a community meeting at a local church truly constitutes a date. She says it no; he says yes. He does his best to make it a date, taking her to an art exhibit, buying her something to eat, going out for a mug of beer, as the film’s true foundation becomes their conversation, ranging from light-hearted arguments over the best Stevie Wonder album deeper matter of their personal lives and far-reaching societal concerns, the latter of which plays less like foreshadowing than the characters’ inherent natures. Their socially conscious discussions are actually an interesting contrast to the more whimsical deliberations of “Before Sunrise’s” Jesse and Celine, which is not to cast dispersions on the talk in “Before Sunrise” but to merely observe how upbringing and social position can inform chit-chat.

This is particularly true of Michelle. “Southside with You”, let’s be clear, is not just The Barack Obama Story, a rom com in which a kindly cad charms his date into falling in love. Michelle is allowed to make very clear that her reluctance to call their day a “date” stems from her place in the world as a black woman. To be his workplace superior and see him socially might well constitute two strikes against her and she’s fearful of taking that chance. At the same time, if Barack gets a moment to question the legitimacy of her job devotion, Michelle gets the same moment to call out Barack. They are equals, and frankly, “Southside with You” lets it come through that Michelle had her shit together sooner than Barack, quietly underscored in a few shots where Tanne has her stand taller in the frame, looking down at her future husband, like she’s telling him to catch up.

Embodying POTUS and FLOTUS is no menial task, of course, but both Sawyers and Sumpter are up to it. As Michelle, Sumpter allows a vulnerability to emerge beneath her dignity, demonstrating how the latter is not just inborn but sculpted and maintained. Sawyers, meanwhile, forgoes simple impersonation. His Barack is introduced in an undershirt, smoking and reading in an easy chair, a Hero Shot if there ever was one, a frame that Robert Mitchum would not have looked out of place in. And Sawyers uses this moment to inform his Obama, evincing a loose swagger, a man with little money in his pockets but a lot of cool confidence in how he speaks and thinks.

This comes home in the riveting community meeting where Sawyers performance and the movie impeccably harmonize, demonstrating Obama’s pre-eminent ability to work a crowd. With his fellow Chicagoans disheartened by being unable to score funding for a community center, Barack slyly takes the meeting’s reigns, holding everyone, including Michelle, in the palm of his hand, as he soothes their pain even as he keeps it real. And if Michelle is transfixed by Barack’s impeccable oratory skills, she is nonetheless intelligent enough to recognize this is genuine civil service as a means to charismatically show off, a duality that is not accidental. It would have been easy to reduce Barack to mere myth, or render him strictly as “one of us”, but in this sequence the entire Obama emerges.

He is calculating but caring, earnest but intent on getting exactly what he wants, less a compromiser than a tell-it-like-it-could-be go-getter. And even if you didn’t already know he and Michelle wound up together, in the face of this scene, well, you would be hard-pressed not to believe that they were a reality.

Patriots Day

Near the end of Peter Berg’s Boston Marathon Bombing docudrama “Patriots Day”, right after the last bomber is hauled out of that infamous Watertown backyard boat, a few cops enter a bar, presumably to toast the long week being over, and the camera momentarily catches sight of a motivational poster which says this: “Remembering Isn’t Enough.” That may as well be the mantra for this docudrama that does not want to remember all the terrible, and good, events of that April 2013 week so much as re-live them with a ferocious pace and boots on the ground aesthetic. Yet this in-the-moment narrative viewpoint also negates an ability to pull back and consider what happened from a wider perspective forcing Berg to convey meaning in characters and situations and little details in-between, which he does with alternating success.

Initially “Patriots Day” comes across determined to lash its narrative to fictional Boston police detective Tommy Saunders (Mark Wahlberg) who, having mucked up with the commissioner (John Goodman), is trying to get back in good graces by working the Marathon’s finish line. It quickly becomes clear, however, as his getting back into good graces subplot almost immediately falls by the wayside, that Tommy is merely meant to provide a through line, a familiar face you can latch on to in each scene. (Tommy’s wife, played by Michelle Monaghan, vanishes virtually the same instant she is seen.) Frankly, the movie should have jettisoned him to focus exclusively on its Boston Strong ensemble.

That ensemble ranges from classic locals, like J.K. Simmons as the Watertown police chief, to a few foreign MIT students, allowing a more multi-cultural picture of Boston to emerge. Simmons in particular does an effective job communicating a contentment with his place in the world from his dry, down-to-earth demeanor. At the same time, I wish Berg had given Patriots Day itself, a sacred event in Boston, more of its gleeful due rather than simply employing his set-up as a means to foreshadow all the bad things that are about to happen. If he had, he would not have necessarily needed to conclude with archival footage of Boston Red Sox legend David Ortiz shouting “This is our f***ing city!” because his movie would have already shown it.

Even so, in the aftermath of the bombing, Berg strongly evinces the incredible haste that goes hand in hand with such momentous decision making, where split seconds are required to make determinations that will reverberate forever. In a small role as FBI agent Richard DesLauriers, Kevin Bacon allows a “I gotta get this right” tension to emerge in his lines and mannerisms that acutely summarizes the pressure of every choice. And while the film neatly explicates the technological particulars with which law enforcement was able to ferret out the Tsarnaev Brothers, by also having to stick to its docudrama immediacy, the larger picture of America’s surveillance state is non-existent. In this context, the surveillance state is only for good because it only exists to get the bad guys.

Ah yes, the bad guys. They are not apparitions here, even though Berg employs actual surveillance footage of them too, particularly of Dzhokhar (Alex Wolff), younger brother to Tamerlan (Themo Melikidze), but fully present, in a way, as we follow them on their whole journey from bombing to the manhunt. This means the film forgoes the specifics of their radicalization, aside, kinda, from one brief inquiry of their brief hostage, MIT student Dun Meng (Jimmy O. Yang), of whether or not he believes Muslims were responsible for 9/11. This, however, comes across in the filmmaking language more like a psychopath and a stoner disconnected from reality. And maybe that’s the case. It might sound insensitive to say, but Alex Wolff gives a pretty chilling performance as Dzhokhar, like someone out of his depth who’s too detached to know it, transforming his bro-ish line readings into a statement of entitled non-purpose, turning the slurping of cereal milk while watching propaganda videos into a manifesto for his cluelessness.

That cluelessness actually accounts for some of the movie’s most frightening moment in which the bombers take Meng hostage in his own Mercedes. The real Meng said his decision to eventually make a run for it was the most difficult of his life and the movie evinces that comment. It’s not nail-biting; it’s dig-your-fingernails-into-your-shoulder-so-hard-the-skin-starts-bleeding. You know that Meng survives, yet Berg dials up the tension to such a degree that absolutely anything seems possible. It’s a sequence that might elicit accusations of exploitation, but which I thought was the movie making its point, much more so than the “do you think this can be prevented?” riposte Wahlberg gets to give that is less a thesis than a possible awards moment.

No, in this Mercedes, the Tsarnaev Brothers are less powerful militants than a pair of hotheaded lone wolves who did not succeed in making any kind of statement in the name of any kind of movement so much as employ no good reason to scare an entire city of out its damn mind.

Fences

Before “Fences” has even faded in we already hear Denzel Washington’s voice. That is apropos. His voice lords over “Fences.” I don’t mean his auteur voice, considering he directed this film, but his voice voice. There is a traditional soundtrack, yes, sure, but Washington’s voice is the true soundtrack. It’s everywhere, nearly all of the time. At one point he opens a window to holler at God and he sounds louder than the thunder and lightning roiling around outside. Washington has always possessed an authoritative voice, of course, and in everything, from the Oscar winners to the middlebrow box office grabs to the dreck. I don’t remember much of “The Siege” but I remember Washington hollering so hard mid-movie his nose bled. And so it’s no wonder that he would be drawn to “Fences”, August Wilson’s seminal, Pulitzer winning 1983 play, in which a one-time Negro Leagues baseball player turned Pittsburgh garbage man in the 1950s lords over his surroundings with speech since it provides Washington the opportunity to verbally cut loose for damn near two hours. Not that his character is just talking to talk, though he kind of is, though we’ll get to that.

When the film finally does fade in, it finds Washington’s Troy Maxson riding the back of his garbage truck with is longtime co-worker and friend Bono (Stephen McKinley Henderson). As they depart the truck, the camera follows them across the street, down the sidewalk and into Troy’s backyard, where we will remain for a good chunk of the movie. Despite the fine set decoration and the very genuinely weary way in which Washington, who also directed, has Troy to plop into his preferred patio chair, this backyard setting comes to feel like a stage, as does the house when the action occasionally moves indoors. Though each character has something to do, usually, sipping gin or knitting or something else, it never feels exactly lived in, with the hustle and bustle of an actual home. There is one moment when Troy has an argument with his son Cory (Jovan Adepo) in the front yard and as the action prepares to unfold, you can sort of see all the actors execute their blocking to be in the proper position so as not to interfere with the camera’s view. It’s disconcerting.

That theatricality can, of course, be traced to the film’s aforementioned theatrical roots. It’s probably inevitable. Washington and Davis acted these parts on Broadway too and sometimes you can see how well he and Davis know these characters. In the smaller space of the movie screen, where intimacy is always paramount despite the screen’s size, smaller actions and spontaneity are typically the most important tools, and the larger actions and rehearsed tones of Washington and Davis mean that their byplay can feel…well, not unnatural, per se, but the two actors are so comfortable in the rhythms of these characters that you can occasionally hear dialogue effecting a certain tone rather than being lived out, like the lockstep way in which their lines can arrive right on top of one another.

Then again, for the all the complaints I’ve admittedly lobbed so far, Washington has a specific strategy that I still rather admired. He is mostly content not to try and overly cinema-ize “Fences”, instead putting focus squarely on the words. Because, what words! Big speeches, stinging asides, brutal confessions, funny, funny stuff, the latter never more so than Troy orating on the overratedness of Jackie Robinson which sounds exactly like something Troy would say. Indeed, the failure in baseball still gnaws at him, and be blames it all on white man’s America, which is completely fair, even if you can’t help but wonder if he’s inflating his own past athletic ability. After all, he incessantly trumpets the need for a man to take care of his own house, except it’s eventually made clear that his house was bought by the money Troy’s older brother Gabe (Mykelti Williamson) was paid for the crippling mental injury he sustained during WWII. In other words, Troy’s self-appointed sage status is something of a fraud, which is precisely what incites these sermons. “You’re not listening,” he declares when he feels like he’s not being heard except the only one who isn’t really listening is him.

Maybe the movie’s best shot is a simple one of Rose leaning against the brick wall, one eye hidden behind the brick, like she has been allowed to be fully present in the face of Troy’s positioning of himself as the man of the house. A mid-movie reveal, however, shifts the playing field as his weaknesses are thrust to the forefront and her strength in the face of such betrayal overrides everything else.

It’s not right to say that Viola Davis steals “Fences.” Because stealing a movie implies a person playing a smaller character sort of doing things on the periphery that become more memorable than what is being done by primary players at the epicenter. Wilson writes the character of Rose so that she assumes center stage and Davis matches that writing with a performance that quietly builds to eventually match the furor of Washington’s. And when it does, Washington does not cede the spotlight. No, Davis rises up, steps into that spotlight and wrests it for herself. She takes over “Fences”, just as Rose assumes the film’s foremost responsibility, a melding that may as well mute all of Washington’s hollering.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Phantom Carriage (1921)

The legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman held much fondness for his fellow countryman Victor Sjöström’s landmark 1921 silent film “The Phantom Carriage.” And according to Turner Classic Movies, Bergman wrote in his autobiography that Sjöström “mostly saw the failings” in “The Phantom Carriage” and “was annoyed by his own sloppiness and lack of skill.” Neutral observers can dispute Sjöström’s assessment of his own skills, of course, and many have since “The Phantom Carriage” is considered seminal not just in the Swedish film lexicon but in the global one too. Still, that defeatism has echoes in the character Sjöström memorably portrays in “The Phantom Carriage” as well as in the attitude of the entire film itself. It is set on New Year’s Eve for a reason, after all, a time of the year that, in the face of getting older, becomes less about laying in gutters with empty bottles for ostensible celebration’s sake than laying in gutters with empty bottles because mostly all we can see as the calendar sets to flip is our own failings.

Perhaps the film’s most famously arresting images involve the titular vehicle, helmed by death itself, typically presented on screen through the use of double exposure, placing the carriage, say, over the image of waves crashing as the carriage comes to collect someone drowning. It doesn’t take any fancy metaphors to explain that these evokes the idea of apparitions, and it retains the spookiness that must have chilled audiences to the bone then. Still, these ghostly images paled in comparison for me to another shot, an earlier shot, set in a cemetery near midnight on New Year’s Eve when the camera picks out a clock tower at about a quarter ‘til midnight. Sjöström includes nothing else in the frame – just the clock tower and darkness all around it. It’s like a lighthouse, warning not of the shore but of time, persnickety time, and all we have failed to do.

That idea of time, so central to December 31st, is part and parcel to the narrative, which is not straight-forward but content to jump in and out and all around, beginning in the present but then drifting back into the past, and further still, a movie layered in three different levels of flashbacks, jumping in and out, like someone’s mind ruminating. Because essentially the film’s principal character – David Holm (Sjöström) – is forced to ruminate over his life.

The film opens with a Salvation Army Nurse named Edit (Astrid Holm) on death’s door as the new year beckons. As she lies in bed, she calls out for David Holm. Why, we do not know, considering he’s a drunken lout, but the flashbacks gradually make it clear that he turned his wife and children away by becoming a drunken lout and now is searching for his wife, perhaps to make amends, or perhaps just to excoriate her. These flashbacks arrive in the wake of David’s death just prior to midnight, marking him as the last person to the die in the old year, meaning that in the new year he will be responsible for shepherding The Phantom Carriage and gathering up the dead. The driver shows up to take David, yet what the driver does instead is less showing his new charge the ropes than showing him how he might reform.

The then American release apparently re-edited the movie into a completely straightforward narrative rather than one skipping around in time, and apparently it sought to render the film as strictly a parable about the dangers of the drink. Those dangers are apparent in the real version too, though nowhere near as prominently, with the alcoholism functioning more as an extension of the terrors of life itself, of the sense that clock is always ticking and that to simply try and keep on keeping on in the face of forever looming death is folly. The women in the movie are almost uniformly presented as tired yet dutiful, bound to what life asks of them whether or not they like it, exasperated with David yet alternately supportive of wanting him to shape up. The choice to do so, of course, is his alone.

“The Phantom Carriage” shares parallels with “A Christmas Carol” in so much as a character is tasked with reforming from his wicked ways by being shown the way things were, the way things are and the way things might be. Of course, “A Christmas Carol” opted for an optimistic ending in spite of so much darkness preceding it while “The Phantom Carriage” is much more nebulous in its conclusion, befitting what Garrison Keillor might have termed the dark Lutheranism of Scandinavia. “Lord, please let my soul come to maturity before it is reaped,” David Holm prays as the film fades out. Except…it feels less like a prayer than a plea. David Holm isn’t just going to be given his happy ending. He’s going to have to earn it. You’re left wondering if he’s really up to a task.

I envisioned a flash-forward ending to 365 days later in which that clock tower would be counting down again to the regret-filled peeling of its bells.

Best Performance(s) at the Golden Globes

Movie awards shows are littered with performers, naturally, yet movie awards shows themselves are so often unperformative. That’s how you wind up with teleprompter-aided introductions where actors botch names or give acceptance speeches where they speak off the cuff, awkwardly reciting names no one knows. And while the 74th Golden Globes that aired this past Sunday night mostly stuck to that script, aside from, say, Kristen Wiig and Steve Carrell fervently committing to their bit, they also eventually emerged as something else.

Presentations of lifetime achievement awards usually involve a broad overview of the recipient’s career with a few light wisecracks thrown in just to keep the mood jovial. It’s a roast, basically, just more P.C. In presenting Meryl Streep with the Cecil B. DeMille Award, however, Viola Davis decided to forgo such standard issue nonsense. She gave a performance as much as an introduction, like a mini-one woman show, honing in on a theme, utilizing pauses to let her varying points linger in the air, even playing different parts, including a brief turn as her own husband. More importantly, Davis played the parts of both herself and Streep, deftly alternating personas in voice, facial expressions and posture, in a conversation about Streep dispensing apple pie making advice, imagining Streep as something like a less sinister Miranda Priestly crossed with that moment in “Doubt” when Streep, while interrogating Philip Seymour Hoffman, goes “hmmmmmmmmmmm.”

But Davis gradually allowed it to emerge that this conversation was less about recipes than an opportunity for Streep to observe behavior, filing mental notes about that behavior, waiting, as Davis said, “to share what she has stolen on that sacred place, which is the screen.” And in drawing on other attitudes and experiences rather than merely her own to sculpt a character she is, essentially, empathizing with others and, by extension, allowing us to empathize with all those attitudes and experiences too.

Taking Davis’s baton, Streep did not so much run with it as settle into place and wield the baton like an actorly weapon. Streep had notes in her hand, which she read from, or appeared to, for a second, before ignoring them, like they were a prop to reel us in, to lower our guard so that when she went there all our mouths would be left that much more agape. She’s a performer, see.

“An actor’s only job,” she said, “is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like.” This tied, inadvertently or not, directly back to what Davis had cited as Streep’s supreme skill. But Streep wasn’t talking about herself so much as him. You know…him, our President Elect. Streep equated our President Elect’s run to the most respected position in our country to a performance, but suggested that it was the opposite of what great performers do, shunning the desire to even try and consider other attitudes and experiences and what they might mean. She accused Trump of turning his back on empathy.

Meryl Streep can sometimes feel like a deity, underscored incessantly, from someone even as incessantly disagreeable as Seth MacFarlane deferring to her reverence at the Oscars to The Onion article in the wake of Sunday night. It’s so easy to put movie stars on a pedestal, which is so many dislike movie stars, writing them off as cultural elites or coastal elites or liberal elites, or whatever the trendy elite is these days. They can emit that elitist air, admittedly, as they often do at awards shows, which might be why some people dislike bestowing gifts on one another galas so much. That’s what was so great about Streep’s speech. She did not get up there to pat her own back but to issue an even-keeled call to arms.

“Escape” gets cited in the popular discourse as such a vital reason for the movies, which was what “La La Land”, winner of so many Globes represents. But empathy is important too, creating work that is not important, per se, but an invitation to, as the esteemed Roger Ebert once wrote, walk a little bit in someone else's shoes. That, if you ask me, is this magic of the movies. Meryl Streep not only used her Sunday night platform to hold our President Elect accountable, she used it to cite “the responsibility of empathy”, directing it at all those performers in the room in rapt attention, holding them accountable to their art going forward too.

La La Land

Early in Damien Chazelle’s retro musical opus “La La Land”, Mia (Emma Stone) declines an invitation to a Hollywood party, and can you blame her since those things are usually populated by pompous movie producers confusing bragging for conversation? But Mia’s three roommates will not abide. So they pester her by way of song and dance, as Chazelle’s camera nimbly darts to and fro amidst the passages of the ladies’ fairly spacious apartment, altering Mia’s attitude, conveyed in Stone’s smile morphing from “Oh, you guys” to “It is on” as they transition from indoors to outdoors. There the four ladies line up on the street, like it’s an asphalt stage, different colored dresses mixing impeccably with the magic hour twilight in the background, like all the world’s a color wheel and the sky is cotton candy, and march directly into your damn heart.

The entire sequence owes a debt to “West Side Story”, just as myriad sequences to come owe myriad debts to other musicals, which is why the reference point that kept popping into my head throughout “La La Land” wasn’t a song and dance extravaganza but Gus Van Sant’s “Psycho.” Chazelle’s film is not a shot for shot remake of anything, granted, even if there are plenty of shots to pick out from other films, but “La La Land’s” foremost intent is not to advance the cinematic conversation. This is, shall we say, Love Letter Cinema, a missive penned on celluloid by Chazelle to the forebears he clearly adores so much. Still, for all of Chazelle’s evident adoration, he seems to forget one crucial component – that is, creating bona fide characters.

Each of Chazelle’s previous films centered on jazz and so it is no surprise that one of his two principal characters, pianist Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), is written as both a savant and savior of jazz. That he’s a prickly reactionary isn’t so odd when considering his intolerance for any progressions in the genre except that Chazelle, confusedly, seems to think this is charming, just as he seems to think the noisy imperiousness with which Sebastian lays on his car horn to occasionally announce his arrival is charming too. And because Chazelle seems to like Sebastian so much, he presents the character as is, with virtually no arc, aside from his burgeoning relationship with Mia.

Mia is a barista who dreams of being an actress and she might be a good one, but we never really know, considering her climactic one woman show happens entirely off screen and the rest of the time she is stuck in bad audition hell. Her aspirations do not warrant as much screen time as Sebastian’s. Stone, however, still wrings some livewire energy out of the role, like a scene where she ruffles Sebastian’s feathers during his gig with an 80s cover band by requesting his un-preferred Flock of Seagulls’ “I Ran” and then erupts into a spastic dance to taunt. It’s her best dance in the movie, and the most unprofessional one, which probably says something.

It’s also indicative of their relationship. They are the Ginger and Fred, of course, beginning at odds only to fall in love, and yet their falling in love is the least convincing element in the movie, perhaps because their relationship is based less on romance than reinforcement. He pushes her to act, even though he’s never seen her act, and she pushes him to open his own jazz club, even though she explicates that she doesn’t like jazz. Indeed, a musical number at the Hollywood Planetarium finds them literally – kind of - departing the earth to float among the stars, a gorgeous evocation of each one trying to push the other higher.

Unfortunately, their lack of romantic heat means the conclusion fails to burn as brightly as might have, because it just doesn’t hurt as much as it could have. Then again, that might not be such a bad thing. “La La Land” knows the harsh truth about dreams, it just refuses to completely surrender to that truth, which is why it’s called “La La Land” in the first place, and why it concludes not with some montage of woe but a willed fantasy that flagrantly and delightfully quotes “An American in Paris” and “Umbrellas of Cherbourg.” With no characters to truly hang its hat on, this sequence is really just a delivery device for The Magic of Movies, and yet, in a way, it is still elementally magic unto itself. I kept thinking of the singing voices of Stone and Gosling, which are no grand shakes, and how they emblemized “La La Land’s” entire feel, like someone in a little club covering a few standards with a lot of love in their heart. Whatever fails to work, well, whatever, because I was still happy to go along for the ride.

Rogue One

“Rogue One” is, first and foremost, as the film’s subtitle implies, “A Star Wars Story”, but it is also A Gareth Edwards Film. And Edwards’ two preceding films, “Monsters” and “Godzilla”, were, as those titles suggest, principally about the monsters. In the former, romantic squabbling partners were drowned out by the eerie atmosphere surrounding the extremely ambiguous titular creatures. In the latter, Godzilla’s climactic tussle with other gigantic monsters causes the humans to realize their piddly place among these beasts. In other words, whether deliberately or not, Edwards created films in which underdeveloped, un-charismatic characters felt part and parcel to the elemental universes into which they were cast.

In “Rogue One” the monsters are fashioned as the Galactic Empire and their Death Star. After all, this film is set in the run-up to the very first “Star Wars” film, filling in the blanks of how Princess Leia Organa’s small band of rebels managed to steal the secret plans of the planet destroying battle station. In telling the story, Edwards, true to his style, comes across more taken with the rebellion itself rather than the specific people populating it. Not that Edwards and his writers Christ Weitz and Tony Gilroy don’t try to give us a strong protagonist in the tersely named Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones).

It’s commendable, of course, that “Rogue One”, like “The Force Awakens”, opts for a female main character, but Jyn is less important as herself than as the daughter of Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), the man tasked by the Empire to erect the Death Star. The movie never gives her traits and never gives her real dialogue. Jones is therefore left to build the character from behavior, such as a splendid shot aboard some sort of transport prison spacecraft where Jones’s ferocious, bulging eyes emit a genuine pent-up rage, and which suggest a female Snake Plissken when the Rebel Alliance recruits her as a means to find her father and eradicate this Death Star. This is the attitude Jones plays to, but the script awkwardly jerks her character from criminal to hero and she never goes all in on this “transformation”, stranding her in some unhappy medium.

There are remnants of a tougher, darker film, in those early eyes of Jones and in the early sequences where Jyn and rebel intel captain Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) drop into some remote outpost called Jedha, prowling the streets among a Mos Eisley-ish crowd, having secret conversations in dark alleys while Storm Troopers lurk around every corner. It is not, frankly, unlike that sequence in “Zero Dark Thirty” where the Americans are trying to get a fix on UBL’s courier, except from the point-of-view of the courier, which in a “Star Wars” movie would have been pretty radical, portraying the Rebel Alliance less as heroes of a space serial and more as true terroristic insurgents.

The movie never commits to that version, just as it never commits to the darker aspects of Jones’s performance, ultimately opting for a more conventional action-adventure in which a small gaggle comes together to fight the good fight. And that’s fine. But in these middle portions, where less plan-stealing thrills unfold, the people on screen are necessary to sustain interest and momentum and no one has any personality, aside a re-programmed imperial droid who, in the voice of Alan Tudyk, delivers his one-liners with a forced cadence, an exasperated “Do I Have To?” It’s a problem when the film’s most memorable people are digital re-creations of previously existing characters.

In these middle portions you can sense the rumored re-shoots and re-writes, with Disney saying “Lighten up!” But Edwards doesn’t know how to lighten up, more consumed by serious ideas than fanciful ones, which is why The Force is nothing more than a bit player in “Rogue One.” One scene finds a Rebel council debating whether or not to go after the Death Star or run and hide. As Inspiration 101, it barely flies, written in terrible platitudes, but a tantalizing idea of the rebels less as a simpleminded united front than squabbling splinters that eventually must unite nevertheless emerges.

That comes through in the conclusion, which brings the alliance’s “first victory against the evil Galactic Empire” that is referenced in the original 1977 scrawl to dramatic life. Here Edwards feels in his wheelhouse, rendering a kinetic battle that cuts between space and the planet below, where attention to detail is everything, like a shot from a Turbolaser turret in which the blast is incredibly deep and echoey, reverberating through you like the bass at some rock concert. What’s more, the frustrating lack of character strangely, wonderfully becomes a strength in this wrap-up. All the rebels come together in the name of their alliance, willing to give themselves up their beliefs, which makes even the extras who are deposited onto the battlefield just to get killed off less typical collateral damage than noble unknown soldiers. Nameless X-wing pilots who get shot down become no different than Jyn Erso, which is problematic, yet also kind of beautiful. No one is greater than the cause.

That also speaks to “Star Wars” more broadly, I suppose, and why these films continue to get produced and reap success, whoever is at the helm, whoever is in them. Sadly, Jyn Ersos will always be a dime a dozen while Star Wars™ will never not be worth its weight in gold.

Legally Obligated Golden Globes Predictions

Tonight the Hollywood Foreign Press Association hosts Hollywood's official office party at The Beverly Hilton. People will win, people will lose, but one thing is for certain - that is, people who say the Golden Globes don't matter will get really, really, really mad at people who act like the Golden Globes matter, while people who act like the Golden Globes matter will get really, really, really mad when certain people win and certain people lose. The stars will simply be drunk, of course, because this is an office party. I'll be drunk too. I don't care who wins and who loses. Still, as a movie blog we are legally obligated to make predictions.

Legally Obligated Golden Globes Predictions

Best Picture, Drama: "Moonlight." If there is one thing the HFPA likes more than hobknobbing with celebrities, it is appearing to influence the Oscar race, and they know a "La La Land" v "Moonlight" showdown is coming and they want a gaggle of Monday Morning think pieces to center on the HFPA "establishing" the "Oscar narrative".

Best Picture, Comedy or Musical: "La La Land." See above.

Best Director: Mel Gibson, "Hacksaw Ridge." In victory, Gibson issues an apology. He never clarifies what the apology is for nor explicates to whom he is apologizing. When pressed backstage to explain the actual intention of his apology, he launches into an expletive filled tirade against the biases of the Lamestream Media™.

Best Actor, Drama: Casey Affleck, "Manchester by the Sea." After employing his victory in the Best Actor category at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards to read blurbs from old reviews citing Affleck's bad performances to get one over on those miserly film critics who clearly have it out for him, Affleck takes this Golden Globes opportunity to read from Amy Zimmerman's Daily Beast article discussing the sexual assault allegations against Affleck to which Affleck adds his own pithy asides. NBC cuts the feed.

Best Actress, Drama: Natalie Portman, "Jackie", who accepts the award and spends the whole evening completely in character as Jackie Kennedy. Afterwards, Daniel Day-Lewis telephones Portman to offer congratulations on her win. "Natalie?" says Jackie (Natalie). "Who's Natalie?" "Impressive," replies Day-Lewis. "Most impressive." Day-Lewis hangs up and begins plotting a film in which he stars as Sacha Baron Cohen and Portman stars as Isla Fisher.

Best Actor, Comedy or Musical: Usain Bolt, "Rio Press Conference." You're simply not supposed to get away with such theatrics. You're simply not supposed to literally dance your way into your Olympic press conference in advance of your attempting to win your seventh, eighth and ninth gold medals. This is the sort of histrionic hubris that has invited the wrath of karma of so many athletes before. Not Usain Bolt. Karma defers to Usain Bolt. He danced and he won every race. You can't stop him, you can't even contain him, you can only cede the stage and watch him samba.

Best Actress, Comedy or Musical. Everyone becomes so worn out with Jimmy Fallon's boyish enthusiasm and Diet Faygo Pop version of Trump putdowns that presenter Nicole Kidman finally decides to tell Fallon that she regrets ever wanting to date him, improvises and names Tina Fey the winner for "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" so, to quote Kidman, "we can get some real hosting going on here." President-Elect Trump, while thumbing through security briefings with Kentucky Fried Chicken grease on them, tweets his disappointment. "Failing Golden Globes just got rid of amazing fallon for dopey fey! Ratings are tanking! Not watching!" 197 seconds later he tweets something to betray that he is watching.

Best Supporting Actor. Aaron Eckhart's Mustache in "Sully." The win incites controversy on two fronts. One, supporters of Tom Hanks's mustache in the same film demand to know why his facial hair did not receive a nomination. Two, anti-category fraud militants are irate, explaining that while Eckhart's performance was clearly supporting, his mustache was clearly leading, and how dare they.

Best Supporting Actress. Penelope Cruz's Hair, "Zoolander 2." This one goes without saying.

Best Screenplay. Kenneth Lonergan, "Manchester by the Sea." Lonergan is denied entrance by Golden Globes security when he is mistaken for a sandwich artist at the Subway on Santa Monica Blvd. Jennifer Lawrence, who is not scheduled to attend but is waiting at the Subway on Santa Monica Blvd eating a meatball sub in case she is needed, shows up to accept the award on Lonergan's behalf.