63. SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY (2018)
Hot on the heels of Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi, which was the best Star Wars film since the original trilogy and may have been better than a couple of those, comes Solo, the most cynical and mainstream-friendly to come out of the Disney era, and the worst movie to boast the Star Wars title. There were many disagreements among the creative team as to what direction it should take; Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who made The Lego Movie and would go on to produce the dynamic Into the Spider-Verse, were fired from the film because producer Kathleen Kennedy thought their cut was unconventional.
Maybe their version would have worked, maybe it wouldn't have, but at least it would have taken the time-tested series somewhere. Instead, we have Ron Howard's version, which--unlike its title character in the Kessel Run--takes the road much, much more traveled by, and plops us essentially where we started. There is no insight into Han Solo as a person, which is not to say that he's a particularly complex character to begin with. We learn nothing about him that we didn't get from the previous entries. Alden Ehrenreich is the correct actor to play the role, but so what? There's nothing much for him to do except be as cocky and self-assured as Harrison Ford. The same goes for Donald Glover, who's a proper heir to Billy Dee Williams as the young Lando Calrissian, but aside from some plot details as to how Han and Lando met--pretty much all of which have been told to us in the series--his emulation is fairly empty.
The early scenes show promise, and the film's first third concerns an exciting heist plot that might have made for a fun thriller if writers Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan had more up their sleeves. When Han hooks up with Chewie and some rebel thieves (Woody Harrelson, Thandie Newton, a creature voiced by Jon Favreau), the team plans to steal a freight of fuel. When the heist goes belly-up, Han finds himself at the behest of the sinister mob kingpin Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany), and on the hook for one big job, for which he will need a very fast ship. Perhaps one that can make the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs (one of the movie's cleverer moves is that it explains that faux pas from the first film).
Technically, all the bells and whistles are there, but it's no fun. The plot careens from reference to reference so that it can end up bridging into the Star Wars universe as we know it, but unlike Rogue One, which ended just as the first one began with a clear purpose and place, Solo feels like pure fan service for fan service's sake. The women are given precious little to do: Emilia Clarke, who was burning cities to the ground on Game of Thrones, has been inexplicably tamed here, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator of Fleabag, fails to elevate the very poorly written role of a "feminist" droid enlisted by Han. If Waller-Bridge had been allowed to contribute to the script, the character may have been a lot sharper. Or at least there would have been a lot more droid side-eyes.
Thursday, February 20, 2020
The Top 100 Movies of the '10s, #72: I, TONYA (2017)
73. THE LITTLE HOURS (2017)
72. I, TONYA (2017)
I, Tonya is the biopic that Tonya Harding deserves. It's a complex story, fitting her neither into the villain role in Nancy Kerrigan's fairy tale that the media concocted in 1994, nor into the victim role that she might project onto herself. She is both. And neither.
Margot Robbie, far too versatile to have been shoehorned into Suicide Squad, plays Tonya from her mid-teens into her thirties, with a loud and sharp dignity and a quieter deviousness. Sebastian Stan endows her on-and-off boyfriend-and-husband, Jeff Gillooly, at once with a dangerous hair-trigger and with an immature innocence. They are two kids thrust into marriage and into professional sports without much of an idea of how to handle either.
The victory in Craig Gillespie's handling of this story is that he dares to tell it all, from the horrific to the ridiculous. A lesser director would fall prey to this very true story's unwillingness to settle into a conventional tone. Moments of silly comedy lead into moments of shocking abuse, because after all, that's how it happened.
The movie is funny, and then it's horrifying. Light moments of goofy comedy--like the hilarious sequence of the knee-bashing itself by Sean Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser), which plays as if Ernest P. Worrell starred in Ocean's Eleven--give way to dark moments of terror. The tonal shifts are smoothed by occasional cuts to present-day narration by both Tonya and Jeff, which assure us that not only are both alive today, but they are thankfully separate from each other.
Allison Janney won a deserved Oscar for playing Tonya's chainsmoking and abrasive mother, though any of the three leads would have been deserving. The movie doesn't ask us so much to believe Tonya's story as to sympathize with her perseverance. She trained from near-infancy to fit a mold that had rejected her, and made the Olympics anyway, and might have left untarnished if not for her alleged attack. Without being naive, Gillespie finds what's admirable in that.
72. I, TONYA (2017)
I, Tonya is the biopic that Tonya Harding deserves. It's a complex story, fitting her neither into the villain role in Nancy Kerrigan's fairy tale that the media concocted in 1994, nor into the victim role that she might project onto herself. She is both. And neither.
Margot Robbie, far too versatile to have been shoehorned into Suicide Squad, plays Tonya from her mid-teens into her thirties, with a loud and sharp dignity and a quieter deviousness. Sebastian Stan endows her on-and-off boyfriend-and-husband, Jeff Gillooly, at once with a dangerous hair-trigger and with an immature innocence. They are two kids thrust into marriage and into professional sports without much of an idea of how to handle either.
The victory in Craig Gillespie's handling of this story is that he dares to tell it all, from the horrific to the ridiculous. A lesser director would fall prey to this very true story's unwillingness to settle into a conventional tone. Moments of silly comedy lead into moments of shocking abuse, because after all, that's how it happened.
The movie is funny, and then it's horrifying. Light moments of goofy comedy--like the hilarious sequence of the knee-bashing itself by Sean Eckhardt (Paul Walter Hauser), which plays as if Ernest P. Worrell starred in Ocean's Eleven--give way to dark moments of terror. The tonal shifts are smoothed by occasional cuts to present-day narration by both Tonya and Jeff, which assure us that not only are both alive today, but they are thankfully separate from each other.
Allison Janney won a deserved Oscar for playing Tonya's chainsmoking and abrasive mother, though any of the three leads would have been deserving. The movie doesn't ask us so much to believe Tonya's story as to sympathize with her perseverance. She trained from near-infancy to fit a mold that had rejected her, and made the Olympics anyway, and might have left untarnished if not for her alleged attack. Without being naive, Gillespie finds what's admirable in that.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)