LONE STAR

Opening this weekend:

Rogue One—In the advertising, it’s referred to as Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, but on the screen it’s simply titled Rogue One. That’s the first of many things I liked about this movie—it’s not Episode Anything or Chapter Anything.

This truly seems to have been conceived as a stand-alone tale, and not as a new branch of the franchise. It doesn’t open with the familiar John Williams fanfare—the fine score is by Michael Giacchino, with borrowings from Williams where necessary—or with a crawl of exposition. We get an occasional subtitle explaining what planet we’re on, but that’s it. The atmosphere is tense and hectic and dark and, despite quite a lot of effective comedy, rather fatalistic.

Having said that, this movie nonetheless felt far more authentically like a “real” Star Wars movie to me than Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones or Revenge of the Sith, the “official” opening trilogy of the series. Like The Force Awakens last year, Rogue One is a strikingly retro work—by necessity, as it's set just before the events of the original George Lucas Star Wars movie, made in 1977.

So the lovingly re-created sets and costumes have a flaky, dated look to them. They feel as self-consciously “‘70s” as bell bottoms or lava lamps. And while there are, among the leads, plenty of women and non-European-looking men—not to mention robots and aliens—the space fighter pilots and the Imperial officials are mostly played by the same kind of saggy white dudes that generally played such roles back in the ‘70s.

If I had to speculate, I’d guess that the script—by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy (based, in turn, on a story devised by effects master John Knoll and Gary Whitta)—grew out of dissatisfaction with a perceived implausibility in the first Star Wars flick: the idea that the whole Death Star could be blown to smithereens by just two wimpy torpedoes from Luke Skywalker. The heroine here, a surly, hard-fighting young delinquent named Jyn (Felicity Jones), is pressed into service by the Rebellion to contact her surrogate father (Forest Whitaker) in hopes of gaining intelligence on that colossal, planet-shattering weapon of mass destruction.

She’s thrown together on this mission with Cassian (Diego Luna), a Rebel agent of uncertain motivation, and K-2SO, a snide, kvetching robot voiced by Alan Tudyk. Along the way, this trio picks up a variety of scruffy misfit allies, and after many twists and turns the story comes to a head in a massive Rebel raid on a force-field-fortified Imperial base.

Director Gareth Edwards, of 2010’s imaginative low-budgeter Monsters, handles the epic action sequences rousingly, and there’s no shortage of visual wonder to the movie. The Death Star and the huge Imperial ships hanging in the skies have a chilling, oppressive awe to them; conversely, there’s a sprightly wit to the sight of swarms of Rebel ships springing out of hyperspace like popcorn kernels popping. The focused storyline allows for less in the way of digressive episodes and strange creatures, although there’s a mind-reading tentacled horror that’s pretty memorable.

But the general visual vocabulary of Rogue One owes as much to classic WWII movies as to sci-fi. “There’s fighting on the beaches,” somebody says at one point. Inevitably, some of the dialogue echoes with contemporary political resonance, and no matter what your ideology, you’re likely to cast “your” side as the Rebels and the other side as the Empire. In any case, the line “Rebellions are built on hope” figures prominently in this film, and hope is something that many of us are sorely in need of right now. 

 

La La Land—Mia (Emma Stone) is a struggling actress, working as a barista on the Warner Brothers lot in the title town. Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is a struggling jazz pianist who wants to open his own club. The story of how they meet, fall in love, drift apart and so forth unfolds via original songs staged as elaborate production numbers.

There’s a lot that’s really good about this picture, and it’s hard not to admire its ambitiousness. Written and directed by Damien Chazelle, with music by Justin Hurwitz, and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, it’s a serious, un-ironic attempt to do something that seems to me very much worth doing—reinvent the old-school movie musical as a fully contemporary form. So I feel like a bit of a bum not being able to join in the general critical rapture. But I don’t think La La Land entirely comes off.

It’s possible that Chazelle has succeeded in creating a sort of neoclassical style for musicals that can be built on. But La La Land’s jazz tunes, though pretty, are a little tame and unvaried, and the large-scale dances have the feel of flash-mob cavorting—they don’t bristle with the intensity and insolent precision of the numbers in, say, a ‘50s-era MGM musical, or, for that matter, of the average "Bollywood" musical.

More problematically, the leads aren’t natural musical performers. Gosling and Stone have a touching rapport as actors—you believe they’re in love—and they dance well. But their voices seem featureless and slight. They’re vivid screen presences until they start singing. As soon as they do, their personalities recede.

For many of us, there are few forms of entertainment that have the potential to generate the sheer excitement of the musical, both on stage and screen. If La La Land brings the genre back to vitality, I’ll rejoice. But while much of this movie is clever and enjoyable, I can’t say I found it exciting.

GHOST CLOWN

Opening this weekend:

Poltergeist—One of the wittier moments in the original 1982 Poltergeist came when the little boy’s clown doll finally came to life and attacked him. What makes the scene brilliant is that, though the poor kid is terrified, he doesn’t really seem surprised.

Do any children actually enjoy clowns? Did they ever? The poster for this Poltergeist remake features another awful clown with a look of indolent evil on his face. At what toy store was this nightmare purchased, and by who, with the idea that it would delight a little kid?

The clown face on the poster is a key to why this new Poltergeist doesn’t work. Like this image, the movie pushes too hard. I like the original film, but have never thought it was all that scary. Its chief appeal, aside from the legs of Jobeth Williams, was its idyllic vision of suburban life, the charm of which was only strengthened by the interruption by malevolent supernatural forces.

The family in the new film, directed by Gil Kenan, has downsized into the haunted house after Dad (Sam Rockwell) has been laid off. The structure is more or less the same as that of the original—indeed, it’s probably a tighter, more coherent piece of storytelling. But despite a few halfhearted attempts at humor, the subtext this time is all anger, disappointment, economic impotence and sexual frustration. Mom (Rosemarie DeWitt) walks on eggshells around Dad’s wounded breadwinner’s pride, and Rockwell gives off such seething fury, especially toward the beginning, that he seems like a greater danger to his family than the ghosts.

Into this already queasy atmosphere Kenan introduces the scare scenes whole-hog, way too early after a perfunctory build-up. I’m pretty easy to scare, and I found most of them routine.

As for the rest of the cast, all three of the kids are excellent, and Jared Harris isn’t bad as a daring celebrity ghostbuster, but the standout among the adults is Jane Adams as a frazzled paranormal researcher. She doesn’t get enough to do, however.

Oh yeah, it’s being released in 3-D. There’s one decent effect, involving a drill bit. Otherwise, as usual, it’s superfluous.

GOOD WELL HUNTING

A small town in southwestern Pennsylvania is the setting of Promised Land. It’s not exactly flowing with milk and honey—it’s a broke, fading farm community. But it’s sitting on oceans of natural gas, so two corporate agents, Steve (Matt Damon) and Sue (Frances MacDormand) descend on the all-too-eager locals, offering what seems like a fortune in return for drilling rights.

Said rights, in this case, mean hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” extremely deep drilling aided by the injection of chemically-enriched water, in order to release gas from beneath otherwise impenetrable rock. It’s a highly controversial technique, on the one hand suspected of polluting water tables—sometimes resulting in flammable water!—killing crops and livestock, and other environmental blight, but prized on the other hand for its promise of increased freedom from foreign oil.

A local schoolteacher (Hal Holbrook) raises concerns at a town meeting, and Steve and Sue’s deal—and Steve’s big promotion—are endangered. Their headache is increased by Dustin (John Krasinki) an engaging fellow who shows up in town with tales of fracking’s horrors, to which the townies, much to Steve and Sue’s fury, are clearly listening.

Scripted by Damon and Krasinski from a story by Dave Eggers, and directed by Gus Van Sant, Promised Land is a great-looking movie. Rather than focusing on the economic bleakness of the town, the cinematographer, Linus Sandgren, emphasizes the verdant beauty of the Pennsylvania countryside, suggesting what these people stand to lose in return for corporate chump change.

Van Sant’s touch is low-key and, as always, tinged with good-natured comedy, as is the acting, especially in the familiar bickering affection between Steve and Sue. There’s also an agreeable love interest for Damon—and maybe Krasinski as well—in the form of Rosemarie DeWitt as an attractive elementary school teacher, smiling with amusement at what a sitting duck she is for these out-of-town boys.

Also built into the material is a plot twist, and while it’s fairly cunning, I couldn’t decide if it helped or weakened the movie. Something weakens it, in any case—it’s watchable and inoffensive, but somehow it doesn’t deliver. While fracking is certainly made to seem reckless, the movie doesn’t work up that much of a lather about it, and it makes the point that if it isn’t natural gas, it’s going to be oil or coal (the idea of decreased consumption is dismissed). The real point, though, seems to be that the people who do this sort of unsavory work for energy (or tobacco, or pharmaceutical, or whatever) companies aren’t moustache-twirling villains; they’re likable folks trying to get ahead.

Anyone who found this surprising would have to be naïve—and if they drive a gasoline-powered car, or buy a fast-food hamburger, or for that matter type a movie review on a computer plugged into an electrical socket, they’d have to be hypocritical, as well. Still, there’s a difference, even if it’s only a slight difference, between using pernicious or questionable technology because it’s most of what’s viably available and actually participating in perpetuating that status quo.

Steve and Sue are pleasant, even endearing, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing what they’re doing, and Damon, Krasinski and Van Sant can’t seem to find a way to confront this dramatically without turning Promised Land sanctimonious. So they don’t quite confront it. They just let the gas leak out of the movie, with a mild, unconvincing sigh.