The Force Will Always Be With Me: A Rise of Skywalker Review.

Well. This is it. Rise of Skywalker. The end of the saga.

I don’t envy the position JJ Abrams was in. Not only did he have to wrap up a storyline some 40 years in the making, he had to course correct from the Last Jedi. I wish he hadn’t. While I wish he hadn’t, I understand that Disney is here to make money, and Last Jedi was divisive so the likelyhood they’d follow up on what it laid down was slim.

But man, at least then we may have gotten something a little less predictable.

This is the part where I tell you I think Rise of Skywalker is fine. I had fun with it in parts. I like the characters and their chemistry, I LOVE the world and I’m even more or last satisfied with where everyone ends up. But how we got there was a two hour bumpy ride that spends more time looking back than moving forward.

Rise of Skywalker is messy. It’s over two hours and yet still we’re rushing, going full throttle to get everyone established and in place to kick off the adventure. Rey is training. Kylo is searching. [Redacted] is back. Rose is here(and deserves better). And It doesn’t really slow down from there. Rarely do we pause to let moments sink in before we fly off to another planet, for another item for the quest. Emotional beats sometimes feel cut short, revelations don’t have the same weight, because we are light skipping towards the end like Poe in the Falcon( that’s a reference for the folks who saw the movie).

But at the same time I had fun. I like these characters, and when they’re all together it certainly feels like Star Wars. It’s fun, bright and energetic. Daisy, John and Oscar have great chemistry together and have really made these characters their own. I wish the movie had taken more time with this core, cuz there’s a lot to work with on that angle. Carrie Fisher’s last performance as Leia was equally good, as good as can be expected given her untimely death. Adam Driver continues to be fantastic as Kylo Ren, who is the Anakin the people deserve and the humor was good. When the movie hits it hits, the saber fights are exciting and the space battles feel big. The score plays the familiar notes and you lean back and you feel it in your chest. It is a Star Wars movie, for better or worse. 

I think my biggest issue with Rise is that it’s predictable which, given how much I liked the subversive Last Jedi, was the greatest sin the movie could’ve committed. I was never surprised by Rise, it never took a turn I didn’t expect. And I wanted it too, I waited for it, but it stuck to its guns. Like I said, I don’t really fault JJ for that. It is what it is. Just not all of what I wanted.

The Rise of Skywalker is not a bad way to cap off this saga. It has the heart of a Star Wars, the emotion and themes of redemption and balance that the franchise has been come to be known for. It doesn’t hit every note it set out to, but ultimately it is not a bad close to the franchise I have loved for so long. As a long time fan, in the moment, I feel conflicted. With time to let it settle, I think I’ll come qroube more.

But this won’t be the end for Star Wars. Not even close. There will be other worlds to see, new ideas to exlore. Because after all…

Look at this dork and his hat.

The Force will be with us. Always. 

Knives Out: And You Thought Your Family Was Rough

There is nothing quite like a good Whodunit.

Now, when I say a good whodunit I’m talking something in the vein of a classic Agatha Christie novel, where the motivations are uncovered slowly, where the pull of the thread reveals another piece, another lie, more deceptions, the shifting of motivations until finally a whole picture emerges and you’re left thinking “Of course, that’s why that was there.”

Knives Out is one such whodunnit.

Directed by Rian Johnson(of Looper and Last Jedi fame) Kinves Out is a tribute to the genre, but avoids being a direct copy of Hercule Peoit style mysteries. The setup is basic, on the surface. The rich patriarch of the family Harlan Thrombry has passed. His death, ruled a suicide. But prior to his passing a private deteive was called to investigate and thus the thread is pulled and the mystery begins to unravel.

The cast onhand is incredible. Jamie Lee Curtis is fantasic as the eldest sister and presumed heiress. Micheal Shanon does a great barely concealed rage and contempt and Chris Evans is just a perfect asshole. Eight years of being Captain America has made me forget he can play a fantastic prick when he needs to; I havent see this Chris Evans since Scott Pilgrim vs the World and he was a delight every second he was on screen. But the real standout performance here was Ana de Arms, who played Harlan Thrombrys nurse and sole confident. She has to not only hide her own secrets from Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc, the Hercule Peoirt stand in for this venture, but also combatthe coniving members of the Thronby family, and she plays such an earnest good character you cannot help but hope she wins out against these assorted collection of jackals.

As I stated earlier, Knives Out is a real throwback to Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle style works, with a good deep pool of suspects and the hint of evidence to kee[ you intrigued, but a larger part of that is the detective themselves. Knives Out gives us Benoit Blanc, who is more Hercule than Sherlock. He’s methodical, clever and relentless. His southern aspect gives him an almost disarming sense of charm and an heir of aloofness but you can see behind his eyes the gears turning as he realizes there’s more at play here than what’s presented, which helps keep the audience enaged. Part of what makes these styles of movies so good, in my opinion, is that the audience is given the information as the same time as our investigator is, which creates a sense of fairness. You have just as much chance to solve the case as Blanc does, and when it’s all revealed you think to yourself “of course! It all makes sense!” It’s something I feel is missing from the later seasons of Sherlock, but that’s a tangent for another day. Sufice to say Craig isn’t playing a copy of other whodunit detectives, but the elments are there. He reads people like books and he’s already one step ahead of everyone the moment he’s on the scene. I’d take a whole series of Benoit Blanc movies or novels. Shame I won’t get them.

The pacing here is brisk, which is something I always appreciate. We don’t waste a lot of time with the set up, the body is discovered within the first five minutes and from there we spend time establishin the major playors, their personalities and the motivatios that will then later turn out to be red herrings. This cuts down on wasted time. Nothing here feels out of place or wasted, every scene is constructed in a way that leads somewhere, even if it doesn’t appear to at first. The wheels are always turning, never dragging and that, coupled with the sharp dialogue that has just a whiff of social commentary, keeps the audience engaged. The worst sin a movie like this could commit woud be being dull, and thankfully Kinves Out avoids that. It’s got a dash of the banter from Clue with the structure of Murder on the Orient Express. It’s very good mix.

Knives Out isn’t a unique movie, but it does what it set out to do incredibly well. It’s nice to get this type of classic throwback, espeically from a director who clearly has a lot of love for the genre, and the kind of hallmarks that people come to an expect from these types of movies. It manages to feel like a classic Chrstie caper, but with a modern flair and if that sounds intriguing to you I urge you to make time for this one.

I’ll Never Look At Seagulls The Same Way Again: A Review Of The Lighthouse.

The two genres in film I struggle with the most are horror, and experimental. I’m picky about my horror. I like it on the suspenseful side and not the shock jump scae side and my brain is to linear for more experimental forms of film making. So when I tell you The Lighthouse, a 2 hour black and white horror movie with experimental elements is going to be in contention for one of my favorite flicks come years end, you know there’s got to be something good here.

The Lighthouse was both written and directed by Robert Eggers who previously wrote and directed 2015’s The Witch. I avoided The Witch when it came out, due to my aforementioned aversion to horror movies and, more than likely, medical issues(2015 was a rough year) but after seeing this I am compelled to go back. Eggers has a unique style, a blend of Lynch surrealism and Hitchcockian suspense which simmers throughout the entirety of the movies run time.

This filmis weird. You need to know that going in. It evokes the memory of films like Eraserhead and The Shining, where things just feel….wrong. You’re sitting there, waiting for one of these two men to snap. It’s uncomfortable. But you can’t look away. It’s masterful filmmaking.

The plot here is simple. Robert Pattinson is the new lighthouse aide working under William Dafoe, a cantankerous old former sailor. They’re the only two on the island, Robert’s stuck working there for 4 weeks and one of the men is definitely insane, and all the while the titular lighthouse looms overhead. What then unfolds is a descent into madness.

With a film like this, being a character driven affair, it needed to nail two things. The characters(obviously) and, even more critical, the pacing. An hour and fifty minutes is a long time to spend with only two characters, even longer when several scenes are just one man staring into the abyss with a thousand yard stare. The Lighthouse nails both. From the minute Winsow, Robert Pattinson’s character, stepped on the island I was engrossed both by how he interacted with Dafoe’s William as well as the island. In a way, and this will sound cliché, the island was a third character, having just as much impact on our protagonists as they do on each other.

I was excited to see Robert Pattinson on the big screen. Since Twilight he and Kristen Stewart have been quietly banging out classics on the independent front, and after I missed High Life earlier this year I was determined to catch this one to see if Film Twitter was right. He’s fantastic here, alternating between anger at dealing with Dafoe’s antics and building anxiety as he tries to figure out the island and the mystery of the lighthouse. Many of the scenes are solely carried by his facial expressions and physicality, and there he excels at showcasing a man slowly going mad from the isolation, and suppressing his own inner darkness.

Dafoe is also a lot of fun to watch here, but for a different reason. He plays a generic old sailor, but he does it so well, and his accent and rants are so good you’re entranced every time he’s on seen. I was constantly trying to figure out just what his deal was, which stories were true, if he was even there at all. The Lighthouse is constantly forcing you to wonder exactly what is happening over the course of the film, and whether it even happened at all.

The cinematography here is incredible. It reminded me of the classic universal horror films from the 30s, things like Dracula and Bride of Frankenstein. It has a real grit to it, primarily due to it being shoot on film. Shooting on film is arduous (I know from personal experience) and The Lighthouse’s production was further complicated by trying to achieve the lighting they needed with incredibly light sensitive film stock. This variety article goes into further detail, but the expended effort was worth it. The way shadows are integrated into each shot, the way the lack of color adds to the feeling of alienation, these elements are essential to the feel of the film overall and, admittedly, would not be obtainable with digital shooting. Shooting this was probably hell, but it was worth it for such a unique film.

Like I said up top the film is bizarre. It is very much not a typical horror film, and I don’t mean that to dismiss those movies or people who enjoy them, it’s just that if you go in expecting something like a Halloween or a Paranormal Activity, you may not enjoy yourself. A viewer at my screening called it pretentious and while I disagree with that assessment, I can see how someone could come to that conclusion. There are definitely some experimental elements here(or avant-garde, if you’re a flaunty film nerd like me) and avant-gard cinema is an incredibly acquired taste. I cited Eraserhead as a comparison and I did not care for that film the first time I saw it. What I’m saying is, it’s okay to not dig this one. It won’t be for everyone. But I highly think it’s worth your time, if you’re willing to give it a shot.