Tag: Adam Driver

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Star Wars: The Last Jedi

In his May 17, 1999 review of The Phantom Menace, Roger Ebert wrote “The dialogue is pretty flat and straightforward, although seasoned with a little quasi-classical formality, as if the characters had read but not retained “Julius Caesar.” I wish the “Star Wars” characters spoke with more elegance and wit (as Gore Vidal’s Greeks and Romans do), but dialogue isn’t the point, anyway: These movies are about new things to look at.”

Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker

Ebert gave The Phantom Menace 3 1/2 stars. Had he been around to review The Last Jedi, he would have had to add several more stars to his scoring system.

In 1999, it had been 16 years since Return of the Jedi, the final installment of George Lucas’ epoch-defining space opera. Those of us who had been fans from the beginning never thought we would see another Star Wars movie, and the anticipation was intense. Ebert, like everyone, was dazzled by the visuals, which heralded the maturation of CGI. But the elemental, mythological storytelling that had made Star Wars a cultural phenomenon in 1977 was missing, the dialog was awful, and the acting ranged into the embarrassing. The prequels were wildly uneven, but there were still hints of what we knew Star Wars could be.

The Last Jedi feels like the fulfillment of that missed potential. It is the most visually stunning of the eight Star Wars films, the characters speak with the elegance and wit that Ebert wanted, and the acting is often outstanding. It is exciting, funny, cute, tense, melancholy, smart, goofy, unexpected, and occasionally profound. The opening night audience at the Paradiso burst into applause four or five times. I cried through two Kleenexes. But most importantly, The Last Jedi is fun. In a year with some astonishing big budget misfires, it represents the pinnacle of 21st-century Hollywood filmmaking.

John Boyega and Gwendoline Christie do battle in The Last Jedi.

The success of this film can be credited to two people. The first is writer/director Rian Johnson, whose 2005 debut film Brick is an indie classic, and who directed one of the greatest hours of television ever produced, “Ozymandias”, the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad. Johnson is clearly a first generation Star Wars geek, but he is skilled and clear-eyed enough to craft a universal story. Johnson’s talent for visual composition is in the same league as Spielberg and Hitchcock. Lucas’ prequels were overloaded riots of color and movement. J.J. Abrams’ The Force Awakens was successful when it aped Lucas’ superior 1970s style. Johnson’s frames are mathematically precise without succumbing to Kubrickian coldness. He’s not afraid to swoop the camera around, but there’s a reason for every movement. From the clarity and acumen of his action scenes, he’s been studying the lessons of Fury Road. But where The Last Jedi exceeds all previous Star Wars movies—and 99 percent of other movies as well—is the use of color. Deep reds, lustrous golds, inky blacks, and vibrant greens reflect and reinforce the characters’ emotions.

Daisy Ridley faces the Dark Side in The Last Jedi

In the tradition of the Saturday morning sci-fi action serials like Zombies of the Stratosphere that inspired Star Wars, Johnson’s screenplay is full of red herrings, hairpin reversals, and betrayal. He was given too large a cast and too complex a situation, and he not only made the most of it, but left the story better and tidier than he found it. Ebert’s Phantom Menace review closes with these lines: “I’ve seen space operas that put their emphasis on human personalities and relationships. They’re called Star Trek movies. Give me transparent underwater cities and vast hollow senatorial spheres any day.” The Last Jedi delivers on both fronts in a way the Abrams’ nü-Trek simply doesn’t.

Not only that, but Johnson can work with actors like Lucas never could. One of the miracles of the original Star Wars is that Lucas, preoccupied with the various technical disasters unfolding around him, largely left the actors to their devices. And yet Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill managed great performances. In the prequel era, it became quickly obvious which actors could wing it, like Ewen McGregor, and which ones depended on dialectic with the director, like poor Natalie Portman. Not all actors in The Last Jedi are created equal, but you get the sense that Johnson has set everyone up to give the absolute best performance possible. Daisy Ridley’s physicality carried her through The Force Awakens, but in The Last Jedi she seems more relaxed and playful, even if her default mode is still “scary intensity”. Oscar Issacs stretches out into Poe Dameron, and by the end of the movie his look is echoing Han Solo’s Corellian flyboy, pointing toward the Harrison Ford-shaped hole he’s filling in the cast.

Kelly Marie Tran and John Boyega

John Boyega’s Finn is unleashed with a new partner, Rose, played by comedian Kelly Marie Tran. Their chemistry is near perfect, and their subplot bounces them off Benicio Del Toro as DJ, delivering a crackerjack turn as one of the shady underworld figures Star Wars loves. Lupita Nyong’o’s Maz Kanata makes the most of her extended cameo. I hope we see more of her next time around, but for now it makes me smile that the phrase “Maz flies away in a jetpack” must have appeared in the screenplay.

Adam Driver as Kylo Ren

Comic book movies are ascendant right now, but the biggest lesson the Marvel and DC teams can learn from The Last Jedi is that you need quality villains to make epic stories work. Johnson’s excellent script gives Adam Driver, a fantastically talented actor, the juiciest role, and he grabs it with both hands. Caught between Supreme Leader Snoke, Andy Serkis’ preening, snarling big bad, and Domhnall Gleeson’s General Hux, the latest in a long line of arrogant Imperial Navy twits, Kylo Ren comes into his own as a complex, conflicted character. In battle, Kylo is a lupine predator, but his eyes are haunted. The Last Jedi is a sprawling ensemble piece, but Driver and Ridley are the real co-leads.

Carrie Fisher as General Leia Organa

Most of the audience’s tears are reserved for Carrie Fisher, who died a year ago, shortly after completing her work on The Last Jedi. Perhaps it is hindsight, but Fisher looks frail and vulnerable as General Leia Organa, her physical appearance reflecting the increasingly desperate straights of the Resistance she leads. But there is fire in her eyes and steel in her voice, and the bravado sequence Johnson designed for her where she at long last manifests her Force powers drew gasps and cheers. We can all only hope to go out on such a high note.

But if The Last Jedi belongs to any one actor, it is Mark Hamill. Luke Skywalker has been both a blessing and burden to Hamill, who at heart seems to be an amiable geek who would be perfectly happy doing cartoon voice acting for the rest of his life. (He is the best Joker ever, and I will fight anyone who disagrees.) Hamill gives the performance of a lifetime as a man who finally broke under the weight of his own legend. The boys who grew up idolizing Luke Skywalker are men now, and Hamill’s performance is full of the regret, hard-won wisdom, and grit that age brings. Luke, the focus of the original Hero’s Journey, provided generations with a mythical model of how to grow up. Now, he gives a model of how to pick yourself up and keep going through a life that didn’t turn out quite like you thought it would.

Daisy Ridley and Mark Hamill

The second person on whom the success of The Last Jedi depends is Kathleen Kennedy. The Lucasfilm honcho is simply the best producer working today. She’s driving the biggest bus in the business, and succeeding spectacularly where so many others fail. Kennedy has practically infinite resources at her disposal, but so did the producers in charge of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Transformers: The Last Knight, The Mummy, X-Men: Apocalypse, and so many other corporate vomitoriums of 2017. The key to producing good movies—and really to any artistic endeavor—is creating a healthy process. This is something that Kennedy, alone in contemporary Hollywood, seems to understand. This year alone, she fired the directors of not one but two Star Wars movies while they were shooting, an unprecedented move that prompted grumbling in both the fan community and the swank brunch spots of Hollywood. But even before The Last Jedi premiered to boffo box office (As of this writing, earning more than $160 million in TWO DAYS), she gave Johnson the deal of a lifetime—a whole Star Wars trilogy to himself. She saw Johnson’s professionalism, knew what she had in the can and wanted more of it. And if you spend 152 minutes in the Star Wars universe in the coming days and weeks, you’ll want more of it, too.

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Logan Lucky

Who is the greatest living American director? That’s the kind of question I usually avoid because it’s unanswerable and ultimately meaningless. Ranking is for sports. What’s important is not who is better than whom. It’s “does the movie work?” Does it make you feel like it intended to make you feel, and if so, is that a good feeling? If a film not only works in the moment, but transcends it and becomes something people want to watch again and again for years to come, that’s the kind of win a director wants to chalk up.

Nevertheless, as I was leaving Logan Lucky, the question of who is the greatest living American director was on my mind. There’s Steven Spielberg, who has an unparalleled breadth and depth of work over the last 43 years. Then there’s David Lynch, who is currently unspooling an 18 hour epic about the struggle for the soul of America with Twin Peaks: The Return.

And then there’s Steven Soderbergh. Along with Spike Lee, he was there at the creation of the modern indie movement, winning Sundance in 1989 with the sleeper hit sex, lies, and videotape. He made George Clooney a movie star with Out of Sight and defined the 21st century’s first crop of superstars with Ocean’s Eleven. Yet he can adapt Soviet sci-fi with Solaris, get his hands dirty in the DIY underground with Bubble, and take a deep dive into political biography with the two-part, four hour Che. Soderbergh is a filmmaker’s filmmaker, the one young directors look to to learn how it’s done. He works fast and lean and gets the job done with a minimum of fuss and bullshit.

It’s that commitment to craft that led him to quit Hollywood filmmaking in disgust in 2013. On his way out, he torched the current corporate regime with his State of the Cinema speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival. What was his idea of retirement? Single-handedly writing, shooting, and editing The Knick, a Cinemax TV series.

Everybody knew Soderbergh couldn’t stay out of the game, and he managed to come back on his own terms. At a time when the mainline studios are running up $200 million tabs to pay for a sinking Pirates of the Caribbean ship, Soderbergh’s new film comes into theaters already paid for using an innovative financing and sales scheme that cut out layers of corporate bloat. Logan Lucky isn’t going to win the weekend, but it doesn’t have to. And that means Soderbergh gets to work without an MBA looking over his shoulder. The results of this financial experiment speak for themselves: Logan Lucky is the best movie I’ve seen in 2017.

Channing Tatum (left) and Adam Driver star in Steven Soderbergh’s directorial return, Logan Lucky.

There I go ranking again.

Rebecca Blunt’s script is so tight you can bounce a quarter off of it. Channing Tatum and Adam Driver are Jimmy and Clyde Logan, two West Virginia brothers who’ve been down so long they don’t know what up looks like. Along with their sister Mellie (Riley Keough), they hatch a needlessly elaborate plan to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway, just across the North Carolina border.

Every part of the sprawling cast is spot on. Katie Holmes swills chardonnay as Jimmy’s ex-wife who left him for a rich car dealer, greased to perfection by Seth McFarlane. Daniel Craig has way too much fun as a mad bomber named Joe Bang, who has to break out of, then back into prison, where Dwight Yoakam is the nicotine stained warden. Just when you think things are winding down, out pops Hilary Swank as an impossibly flinty FBI agent hot on the trail of the robbers-turned-folk-heroes.

It probably goes without saying that the photography and editing are beyond reproach, but I’m going to say it anyway. Logan Lucky is a ruthlessly designed and executed entertainment machine, but its obvious virtues may obscure its depth. Appalachia’s lack of affordable health care, the toxic at-will employment environment, the ravages of the for-profit prison industrial complex, and the impossible burdens of patriarchy on women young and old all serve to create plot points along the way to wacky larceny. With an instant classic comedy as subversive as it is hilarious, Soderbergh has served up a stunning rebuke to corporate Hollywood and cemented his status as one of the all-time greats.

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Paterson

To soothe my jangled, post-election nerves, I recently rewatched Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train. Released in 1989, the film was on the vanguard of the American indie revolution. It pioneered the indie trope of preferring multiple, small stories over one, big, overarching plot, providing an inspiration to Richard Linklater’s 1991 Slacker; as well as the interlocking, time-shifted narrative structure that Quentin Tarantino would put to effective use in 1994’s Pulp Fiction. Jarmusch’s quiet, humane, observational style would resonate in films from Harmony Korine’s Kids (1995) to Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003). It was also the Big Bang for a lot of Memphis filmmakers who caught the bug while working on the South Main set or chased rumors of Joe Strummer shooting pool at the P&H.

Jarmusch’s new film, Paterson, is something of a spiritual successor to Mystery Train. It is a celebration of place, only where Mystery Train winds through Memphis’ mythicized landscape, Paterson rambles through the working class town of Paterson, New Jersey, in a battered old bus. Both films have a time constraint: Mystery Train takes place in the course of one eventful day at the flophouse, while Paterson is one week’s worth of poetic journal entries. The biggest difference between the two films is perspective. Mystery Train views Memphis through the eyes of rockabilly-obsessed Japanese tourists and down-on-their-luck street thugs. Paterson‘s POV stays strictly with its protagonist, a bus driver named, appropriately enough, Paterson, played by Adam Driver.

Paterson (the character) is a quiet introvert. In the opening shots, Jarmusch establishes him as a highly ordered, simple, light sleeper who is, like the actor who portrays him, a Marine veteran. We watch him go about the rhythms of his day: He gets to work early, jots down a few lines of poetry in his journal while he’s waiting to roll out of the station, exchanges words with his perpetually aggrieved supervisor, Donny (Rizwan Manji), drives the good people of New Jersey around on their daily chores, returns home to dinner with his wife, Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), and then walks Marvin, their bulldog, to the neighborhood watering hole, run by Doc (Barry Shabaka Henley), where he nurses a single beer.

It’s a simple life, but it suits Paterson just fine, because it gives him time to pay attention to the two things he is devoted to: his poetry and Laura. I am wary of movies about writers for a couple of reasons. First, movies are written by writers, and writers can self-mythologize in pretty ugly ways. Second, there is the inevitable scene where the guy (it’s almost always a guy) whom the movie has been setting up as a genius finally reads his writing aloud, and it’s terrible. Refreshingly, Paterson focuses on the poet’s process. Lines appear onscreen as they are written in Paterson’s journal, and we see the fits and starts followed by a sudden outpouring of words. Even better, the poetry actually sounds like it was written by a talented bus driver who idolizes William Carlos Williams.

Driver’s stoic, subtle performance will go a long way towards cementing his status as America’s Dreamy Boyfriend. On the surface, Farahani’s character skews toward manic pixie dream girl territory, but it becomes clear that we’re seeing her through the eyes of Paterson, who adores her unconditionally. She’s not perfect, he just paints over her foibles and doesn’t mind that she’s not as good a cook as she thinks she is. The third outstanding performance is from the dog, Marvin, who consistently brings the best schtick to this low-key, almost comedy.

If the rise of Trump signals a resurgence of toxic masculinity, Paterson brings an antidote. Driver’s Paterson is a compassionate, intelligent everyman without a greedy bone in his body. He’s quietly interested in the people around him — the conversations he overhears on the bus and at the bar provide Jarmusch’s signature micro narrative moments — and is heroic in the Hemingway sense of the word: He does his duty. Paterson is not a self-aggrandizing world conqueror, but one of the quiet heroes with hidden depth that make the world go around. Paterson may end up being one of the definitive films of our time, a careful character study of a man who makes a tough job look easy, kinda like Jarmusch himself.

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Silence

If God is good, and everything he does is good, then why is man doomed to a lifetime of suffering? That’s a problem that has bedeviled every philosopher since Plato put stylus to goatskin. All religions must address it at some point, even if it is just to wave it away. It’s also the central question around which Martin Scorsese built his epic, Silence.

It’s 1633, and the age of colonialism is in full swing. Jesuit missionaries, Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver), find out that their mentor, Cristóvão Ferreria (Liam Neeson), has gone missing in Nagasaki, Japan, amidst a crackdown by the shogunate on the country’s small but fervent Christian population. Worse still, the last word on Ferreria was that he had denounced Christianity before meeting his uncertain fate. Rodrigues and Garupe can’t believe that and ask permission to sneak into Japan and clear their teacher’s name. Reluctantly, their superiors agree, and they book passage with smugglers from Macau to Japan. Their guide, the only Japanese person they can find, is a drunken lout named Kichijiro (Yôsuke Kubozuka), who takes them to a tiny fishing village on the Japanese coast. There, they find a population terrified by the Inquisitor Inoue Masashige (Issei Ogata), a ruthless hunter of Christians.

Jesuits have a reputation as something like Christian ninjas, so laying low in the neighborhood priest hole is no big deal for Rodrigues and Garupe. As word spreads through the Christian underground, Rodrigues, whose internal monologue provides the narration for the early part of Silence, finds himself amazed at the hardscrabble faith of the downtrodden fisher people who brave the shogun’s patrols to come to confession. When he sneaks off to a neighboring village, he converts hundreds of souls. Maybe the difficulties of Japan have been overstated, he thinks, and his simple faith will be enough to save a country.

He is completely wrong. The Inquistor’s men catch wind of the presence of the priests and descend on the village, forcing Rodrigues and Garupe to flee as the villagers sacrifice themselves on their behalf. Watching three villagers suffer for days as they are crucified in the ocean is just the first of the unimaginable spiritual and physical torments that await the priests, and the audience, as the 161-minute film rolls on.

There is much to admire about Silence. In his skill as an image composer, Scorsese has few, if any, peers. Working again with The Wolf of Wall Street cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto, he creates one stunning tableau after another, beginning with the opening sequence in a misty hot spring that recalls Kurosawa’s “Mt. Fuji in Red” segment from Dreams. Garfield, only two years removed from hanging up his Spider-Man tights, gives it all in the portrayal of a priest whose worldview slowly crumbles around him. Driver is, as usual, fantastically physical. In one breathtaking long shot on a beach, an emaciated and filthy Driver towers over his captors, communicating his fear and defiance with only his gait. Ogata, a Japanese comedian, is a revelation as the surprisingly hospitable Inquisitor. And it’s good to see Neeson getting some meaty roles to chew on where he doesn’t have to rescue any kidnapped girls.

Scorsese has been trying to get this film through development since 1990. In the ensuing decades, he seems to have identified a little too strongly with his protagonists. Silence doesn’t so much question suffering as wallow around in it. The priests’ mission is difficult, but frankly, they don’t seem to be very good at their jobs. Instead of bringing peace to their flock, they bring only misery, and their famed Jesuit spy craft leaves much to be desired, as they are are easily flushed out by the authorities’ superior knowledge of the land and culture. When Rodrigues is being ferried in secret to a village by a grumpy boat captain, he has a moment of clarity: “I’m just a foreigner bringing trouble to these people.” Indeed, when he reaches his destination, it has already been destroyed by troops looking for him.

Scorsese has been in these theological waters before, helming the vastly superior The Last Temptation of Christ. Garfield is good, but he’s no Willem Dafoe. The controversial 1988 film found transcendence in the material world, while the message of Silence seems to be “Suffering sucks. Get used to it.”

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Midnight Special

There was a time when the mission of science fiction was to produce a “sense of wonder” in the audience. You can see this in the works of masters like Ray Bradbury, who was able to effortlessly translate the terror of the unknown into the joy of discovery. Arthur C. Clarke was at his best when creating stories of exploration where there was very little conflict between the humans who set themselves against the vast strangeness of the universe.

This kind of sci-fi, which became much rarer after the ascendence of Philip K. Dick’s paranoid worldview, was reflected in some of the great films of the 20th century. In the hands of a master, like Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Steven Spielberg in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, film is the perfect medium for conjuring up secular religious awe. In lesser hands, the lack of overt conflict can get boring.

There’s no shortage of conflict in Midnight Special, the new film from Jeff Nichols, the Little Rock writer/director, who is the brother of Memphis rock star Ben Nichols, lead singer of Lucero. Alton Meyer (Jaeden Lieberher) has been kidnapped by his father Roy (Michael Shannon), and they are on the run, with Lucas (Joel Edgerton) along for muscle. But it’s soon apparent that this is no ordinary domestic conflict gone bad. Alton, who wears blue swim goggles, can’t go out in the daytime, and avoids too much stimulation by obsessively reading comic books, is a willing accomplice in his kidnapping. And the people they’re running from are a dangerous cult, whom we meet when the FBI raids their church service. They look like a fundamentalist Mormon or Mennonite congregation, but their scripture is a strange techno-gibberish that lead FBI investigator Paul Sevier (Adam Driver) reveals as classified satellite communications that were apparently intercepted by Alton’s brain.

Adam Driver hunts that sci-fi “sense of wonder” in Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special.

That’s not the only weird thing Alton’s brain can do. When he gets too stimulated or emotional, blinding light shoots out of his eyes, like the kids in the immortal, 1960 British horror film Village of the Damned. And, most importantly, for the cult that sprang up around him, he can induce ecstatic visions in other people during intense, mutual trances. But each supernatural experience drains Alton a little bit more, and it’s clear from his pale, shaking frame that he can’t take much more. Roy has studied Alton’s revelations and, after reuniting him with his mother, Sarah (Kirsten Dunst), is determined to get the boy to a mysterious set of coordinates in three days, where they believe the boy’s salvation is to be had.

Lieberher is a gifted child actor who wowed in his film premiere opposite Bill Murray in St. Vincent, and his otherworldly stare is at the heart of making Midnight Special believable. Nichols, who also wrote the film, is clearly riffing on Close Encounters and E.T., and for stretches of the film, he achieves the tricky tone of sci-fi wonder, thanks mostly to his well-designed shot choices and spare but effective special effects. But Spielberg’s classics also had flashes of humor and an undercurrent of raw-edged family drama. Midnight Special has one, slack-jawed gear. Dunst, Edgerton, and the evil cultists all carry the same glazed, far-away look on their faces for most of the film. Worst of all is Shannon, who appears to be reprising his role as General Zod’s corpse in Batman v Superman. Driver is, once again, the best actor in the film, and Nichols gives him a little more room to be playful.

As demonstrated by the Syfy Channel’s recent failed attempt to adapt Clarke’s masterpiece Childhood’s End into a miniseries, the “sense-of-wonder” stories are difficult to translate for our more cynical times. Midnight Special is uneven, but just successful enough to suggest that there’s room in contemporary sci-fi for more positive, contemplative films.

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“Broad City” and “Girls” Vie For The Voice Of A Generation

Abbi Jacobson and Illana Glazer of Broad City

It is unfair that Broad City and Girls are so often mentioned in the same breath because the two shows’ differences are many, while their similarities are surface-level. Both are half-hour comedies about white, female friends in their mid-twenties as they navigate sex, jobs and friendship in New York City. Both are written, directed and acted by their female creators. And both are saddled, time and again, with defining Who Young Women Are for the dry sponge of baby-boomer-run media. With both series debuting new seasons this month (Girls on its 5th and Broad City on its 3rd), we should ready ourselves yet again for an endless puddling of comparative lit devoted to the shows, in the mediocre company of which we can count this blog.

Despite their skin-deep similarities, Broad City and Girls are different species. It’s easy to love Broad City and hate Girls. It’s fun to watch Broad City while, at times, it almost physically hurts to watch the self-defeating character machinations of the women and men on Girls. And while Lena Dunham’s sea-change of an HBO show tends to garner criticism for its white, middle class myopia, Broad City gets a critical pass, even a critical hi-five.

Broad City, a Comedy Central production, takes the classic plot approach pitting its odd couple leads against an episode-defining event. One of the show’s inaugural episodes follows Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer as they try to raise money to go to a Lil Wayne concert, navigating everything from Craigslist to the Q Train to make it happen. In its newest episode, Abbi and Ilana struggle to make it to a former roommate’s art opening, encountering rabid warehouse sales, a circus school graduation, and a moving porta potty along the way. The structure is predictable but the take is fresh — the show’s humor is expertly patched together from whatever was on Twitter last week and the fucked up story your friend from college told you about her crush. In this new episode as in the past two seasons, they pull it off.

Formally, Broad City is the “Frogger” episode of Seinfeld taken to its logical conclusion. Nothing ever happens. It doesn’t matter if George Costanza gets Frogger across the street or not. It doesn’t matter if circus school is in session. It is less about the characters, lovable as they are, than it is about the weird fabric of New York City. This bodes well for the series longevity, so long as the writing stays good.

But the by-the-book approach of Broad City also somewhat limits what I cringe at calling the “radical potential” of a show like Broad City, because, at the end of the day, this is a complex portrait of being young and loving weed and hating your job in New York City, but it’s a simple draft of what female friendship looks like.

Allison Williams, Jemina Kirke, Lena Dunham, and Zosia Mamet of Girls

Girls— frequently intolerable, unkind to its characters, caricatural, too white, set in New York City but never on the subway (this really annoys me) — nonetheless stakes a more difficult claim. It still seeks, and has always sought, to expand the category of what kinds of female relationships, bodies and emotions can be shown on mainstream television. In its 5th season, we meet Marnie (Allison Williams) on her wedding day, neurotically over-directing her doomed nuptials with chronically selfish boyfriend, Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach.) (If you don’t want spoilers, stop reading here.) Hannah is on hand, acting surly: “She has been so inappropriate and unsupportive of me all day,” Marnie complains to Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), while Jessa (Jemima Kirke) flirts with danger in the form of Hannah’s ex, Adam (Adam Driver). The episode switches lithely between the women’s wedding preparations and the men’s. The writing is good: “This conversation sounds like a fucking E. E. Cummings poem,” rails the series current hero, Ray, when Adam and Hannah’s new boyfriend engage in a long-form, male emotion-grunting session. 

As far as episodes go, the newest is far from the most challenging. Girls cut its teeth on crack, nudity, awkward sex, alcoholism, BDSM and (perhaps most offensive) painfully unlikeable characters. None of that here. The biggest success of the first episode of the 5th season of Girls is that we have the same characters, improbably intact, that we started out with years ago. They have changed the way real people change — subtly. They have not been good friends to each other, but they have not been entirely bad friends to each other. Instead, the quartet of women proves something that is very true but too rarely portrayed, which is that sometimes your best friends are not the people you most like, but the ones you end up with. And that is okay.

Yes: With the start of these new seasons, I still feel some aversion to watching Girls and I like watching Broad City. Both are good shows. Neither offers a good five point summary of what is means to Be Female and In Your Twenties Today (take note, think-piece editors of the world.) They aren’t really even comparable, except that when both premiere new episodes next week, I have to say — despite how much fun Broad City is, I’ll probably watch Girls first. 

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Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Rejoice! It’s good!

Star Wars fans have spent more than a decade in the wilderness. Sure, there were some great moments in the prequels, but over all, but there’s no denying that the twenty-first century has not been kind to George Lucas’ vision. But our time in the wilderness is over, and we have returned to the promised galaxy.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is not a perfect film. Parts of the second act are muddled. The galaxy now seems a little less vast, and the political details are undercooked. There are times when the cast are shuffled around unnaturally to feed the needs of the plot. J. J. Abrams simply does not understand how hyperspace works.

John Boyega as Finn

But you know what? The prequels gave us complex galactic politics as Lucas tried to transform Flash Gordon into Issac Asimov’s Foundation. Truth to be told, that’s what the fans who had obsessed over every detail in the Orig Trig thought we wanted, but we were wrong. I will forgive Abrams for playing fast and loose with the details of a fictional FTL drive cobbled from A Wrinkle In Time, because the tear-stained faces of the faithful streaming out of the 7 PM Paradiso screening last night attested to what he got right.

From Abrams history in TV and film, particularly in his butchering of the Star Trek universe, it’s clear that he’s better at character than plot. That made producer Kathleen Kennedy’s choice of Abrams to helm the reintroduction of Han and Leia a wise one, and her decision to have The Empire Strikes Back writer Lawrence Kasdan riding herd on him one worthy of Yoda. Gone is the unspeakable mishmash of dialog from the prequels. Kasdan’s screenplay is weighed down with an unwieldy cast, but pair of leads emerge in the persons of Harrison Ford and Daisy Ridley.

Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca and Harrison Ford as Han Solo

At this point, the only thing that could draw Ford out of a comfortable retirement of recreational aviation and bopping Calista Flockhart is the prospect of taking the controls of the Millennium Falcon one last time. Ford phoned it in for years in one big budget paycheck movie after another, which makes the sight of a fully armed and operational Han Solo something to behold. In the 30 years since the Battle of Endor, Solo has seen personal tragedy. He’s not the happy go lucky rogue any more, even if he’s returned to the pirate lifestyle, but neither is he a broken man. Chewbacca is still at his side, but he’s more than just a furry sidekick this time around. Kasdan and Abrams have made him a full fledged hero in his own right. Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia is now General Organa, charged with defending the weak and fragmented Republic against the First Order, a fascist movement built from the fragments of the Empire. Leia’s not in the center of the action any more, but when Fisher and Ford share a screen for the first time in 32 years, this reviewer’s tears flowed freely.

Carrie Fisher as Leia Organa

Taking Leia’s place is Daisy Ridley as Rey, an orphaned scavenger on the planet Jakku living off the scraps of the final battle that broke both the New Republic and the Empire’s militaries twenty years earlier. Ridley proved to be the project’s best casting choice, as she easily holds the screen with both legends and talented newcomers. She has the air of a bona fide movie star in the making. Her chemistry with John Boyega, who plays fugitive Stormtrooper Finn as a Cowardly Lion, bodes well for the future films.

Daisy Ridley as Rey

Rey’s opposite is Kylo Ren, played to the hilt by Adam Driver, who attracted attention on HBO as Lena Dunham’s boyfriend on Girls. Driver’s background in post-mumblcore naturalism serves him extremely well, as he paints Kylo Ren not as a cold force of evil nature like Darth Vader, but as a petulant, wannabe punk, prone to fits of rage and delusions of grandeur. To the audience, it’s clear that he’s just a pawn in a larger game being played by the Emperor’s successor, Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis), but he hasn’t figured it out yet.

Adam Driver as Kylo Ren

I won’t be responsible for spoiling the ending for you, except to say that the emotional climax is devastating.
There are many callbacks to moments in the Orig Trig, but it would be wrong to say that The Force Awakens is a mere rehash of A New Hope. Sure, there’s a formula to these things, but Kasdan and Abrams are doing more than just walking us through the Stations of the Force. It makes perfect sense, for example, for the First Order to pursue the Tarkin Doctrine and construct its own superweapon. In the case of the good guys, no less an authority than Foreign Policy magazine weighed in this morning with this: “In hindsight, it’s clear that, for the Rebel Alliance the Imperial defeat at the Battle of Endor was a classic example of a catastrophic victory: a sudden collapse of a seemingly unbeatable foe that produced opportunities it was unprepared to exploit.”

Like a Chuck Jones Looney Tunes cartoon, The Force Awakens speaks on multiple levels. The kids will respond—strongly—to the swashbuckling and derring do, and the vibrant new stars in the making. For older fans like myself, there is a poignance in seeing how things turned out for our old heroes who won the Star Wars but botched the peace, leaving the next generation to clean up their mess. So it always goes.

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Film Features Film/TV

While We’re Young

So, Generation X is pushing middle age now. It’s okay. Our pop culture has been preparing us for it since the 1980s. The tone of Noah Baumbach’s new film While We’re Young is not that different from Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture that appropriated the name of Billy Idol’s first band and applied to us. Coupland’s cast of self-destructive, 20-something slackers had been told all their lives that they didn’t have it as good as their parents, the Baby Boomers. Their internalized, preemptive disappointment often looked like nihilism from the outside, but from the inside, it felt like fighting back with the only tool we had: refusal. The Baby Boomers wanted to change the world for the better, but it didn’t work out like they planned. We decided to opt out of the aspects of America we found stale and rancid. We took our characteristically defeatist motto from Nirvana: “Oh well/Whatever/Nevermind.” If our grandparents who won World War II were the Greatest Generation, we were the Grumpiest Generation.

Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts in While We’re Young

For Ben Stiller’s character Josh, the preemptive disappointment of the 1990s has given way to the muddled malaise of the 2010s. He’s a filmmaker whose first documentary Power Elite was well received by critics but is now available only via VHS tapes for sale on eBay. He’s been working on his follow-up doc for eight years now, but it’s still six hours long, and when he tries to explain what it’s about, he can only say, “It’s about America.” His wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) is a movie producer who works with her father, a storied documentarian from the film verité days named Leslie Breitbart (Charles Grodin). Josh’s resentment of his father-in-law’s success and his own relative obscurity means they don’t get along very well, but otherwise, he and Cornelia seem to have a pretty good life in Brooklyn. But when their friends Fletcher (The Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz) and Marina (Maria Dizzia) have a baby, it brings some of their discontent bubbling to the surface.

That’s when Josh meets Jamie (Adam Driver) while delivering a lecture to indifferent college students, in a scene that recalls Holly Hunter’s ill-fated speech on journalistic integrity in Broadcast News. Jamie is an up-and-coming documentarian who has actually seen Power Elite. The two hit it off, and soon Jamie and his wife Darby (Amanda Seyfried) are hanging out with Josh and Cornelia on the regular, despite their 20-year age difference. Josh and Cornelia find themselves reinvigorated by their new friends, who have a spark of youth they seem to have lost. “They have all the stuff we threw out,” Cornelia says of their vinyl-listening, VHS-watching new besties. “It just looks so much better in their space.”

Naomi Watts in While We’re Young

Baumbach’s been directing arch indie comedies about uncertain slackers since 1995’s Kicking & Screaming, but While We’re Young seems like a welcome departure for the auteur. He first collaborated with Stiller on 2010’s Greenberg, but this time around the tone is more generous and extroverted. Stiller successfully walks (and sometimes pratfalls) the line between sympathetic and jerky, but by the end he seems to have grown — something that doesn’t always happen in a Baumbach film. Watts brilliantly brings depth and charm to a character who, in lesser hands, could come across as underwritten. Crucially, she and Stiller are totally believable as a couple who’ve been together for a while, but who are still in love. Girls co-star Driver just seems to get better and better, and he is great as the younger, hungrier version of Stiller’s Josh. Grodin represents the older, more successful version of Josh, and when it becomes clear that he has more in common with the hustler Jamie than his fussy perfectionism, it only fuels Josh’s resentment and pushes him into greater, more hilarious humiliations. The most surprising performance is by a bearded Horovitz as a wide-eyed new father. Who knew Ad-Rock could act? But that’s the charm of While We’re Young: It starts off as a familiar comedy of postmodern manners before opening up and embracing a wider world. Cheer up, it says to Gen X. Everybody’s in the same boat. Get over yourselves.