This movie was nearly interesting--there were some moments when it could have taken a really cool turn, got some dramatic irony or moral ambiguity going, a la The Americanization of Emily. But nope! It's a normal WWII movie that was made fourteen years after the war ended. Bizarre.
A character in this movie does the most heroic thing you can do in this sort of movie: she stops a village from being burned down, preventing the traditional "burnt village" scene. The villagers get slaughtered anyway, but a valiant effort.
It's totally Abrams-friendly! Star Wars is based on action set-pieces and eyeball kicks, not thought experiments. The Star Trek characters are all military officers who serve together, but the Star Wars characters are distinctive archetypes, so it doesn't bog the film down to give everyone their scene. We expect a Star Wars movie to have a megalomanical villain, so it's not a disappointment when it happens every single time. The morality is cut and dried: light side, dark side. You can make the hero fight a giant spider in the second act and it makes perfect sense.
I think Star Trek is an important contribution to human culture, whereas I think Star Wars is a fun couple of movies that got out of hand, but I gotta face facts: the Star Wars movies that actually get made are now better than the Star Trek movies that actually get made. I don't like it, but that's what how Hollywood works.
Anyway, a really fun movie. I'm especially tickled that they made the hypothetical "plumbing contractor who works on the Death Star" from Clerks into a compelling, canonical Star Wars character.
One, as I've mentioned before, ninety minutes is kind of my cutoff point. I'll watch almost any kind of film if you can keep it to ninety minutes. If you go beyond that point, I need something compelling, like a plot, or fight sequences, or I get antsy. This film is over two hours long, and...
I'm averse to films that could end at any time. The Last Picture Show is such a film. It has a through-line, sure, but since the point of the film is that life is a stochastic process that just creeps at its petty pace to the last syllable of recorded time, I'm sitting here at minute 90+k unsure if this movie's ever going to be over or what. Whereas Celine and Julie Go Boating has a rough first hour, but by ninety minutes a plot is apparent, and by the two-hour mark you can see what has to happen for the film to come to a conclusion.
Just to end on a positive note, it was nice to see young Jeff Bridges. And if you want a cynical 1970s black-and-white Bogdanavich film about the horrible past that's funny and full of life, check out Paper Moon (1973). That movie's more my speed.
Hilarious and worth a watch, but not tight enough to be a work of genius. Trying to do The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep and Casablanca all at once makes it less a tightly focused experience like Airplane! and more like the omnibus spoof movies that dominated stupid comedy in the 2000s. I do think this movie is funnier overall than Airplane!, but I prefer verbal comedy to sight gags, and there's no wasted space in Airplane!. Unless I mentally edited that movie as well.
And now, the Television Spotlight focuses on a show that we watched in its entirety
in December:
If you look at the reviews for this movie, you'll see that a lot of the low-rated reviews are based on complaints about historical inaccuracies, but they're generally pretty minor inaccuracies, well within the range of... Creative License. In fact, in the final episode, Adams, talking to John Trumbull, makes the 'historical inaccuracy' critique more effectively than most John Adams reviewers, who admittedly may not have made it to the final episode. Just a little bit of fourth-wall breaking to send you on your way.
I haven't read the book but I think this series does a good job of portraying Adams the way he might have seen himself: as an unappreciated figure, always working away in someone else's shadow, a man whose greatest accomplishment as president was having the guts to do nothing when the public was demanding he make a horrible mistake.
(1) Tue Dec 29 2015 17:13 December Film Roundup:
The final Film Roundup of the year! Step onto the red carpet, and... no, wipe your feet first! Geez.
- Comments:
Posted by Joe Mahoney at Tue Jan 05 2016 14:34
I almost choked on my coffee when I got to the CLERKS reference. You're the first person I'm aware of to make the connection and now I'm wondering why no one else has picked up on it.