Tag: Rosario Dawson

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Ahsoka

Rosario Dawson plays Star Wars fan favorite Ahsoka Tano.

Ahsoka Tano was the best new Star Wars character introduced during the prequel era of 1999-2013. She was introduced in The Clone Wars animated series as Anakin Skywalker’s padawan apprentice. Ashley Eckstein voiced the head-tailed Togruta hero as she grew up on-screen during the show’s seven seasons. As the war, the contradictory demands of the Jedi Council, his secret romance with Padmé, and the malign influence of Senator Palpatine slowly changed Anakin from gung ho Jedi to genocidal Sith Lord Darth Vader, it was his relationship with Ahsoka that kept him balanced. But Ahsoka could see what Anakin could not, and she became disillusioned with both the war and Jedi idealism. When she was falsely framed for war crimes in season 5, she became one of the few Jedi to ever resign from the order — as it turned out, just in time to avoid Order 66.

When The Clone Wars returned after cancellation in 2017, showrunner David Filoni spent most of his time wrapping up Ahsoka’s story. But then she returned, 20 years older and much wiser, as Fulcrum, the nascent Rebellion’s most valuable intelligence asset, in Rebels. The character makes her live action debut in the limited series Ahsoka, now portrayed by Rosario Dawson. Filoni, who has been integral to The Mandalorian and other Disney+ live action Star Wars series, returns to oversee the fate of his most beloved creation.

Ahsoka is set in the same era as The Mandalorian. The Empire has been defeated, and the New Republic is struggling to rebuild as much of the galaxy slips into warlordism. Ahsoka and her comrades Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) and Hera (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) survived the war. But nascent Jedi Ezra Bridger (Eman Esfandi) is missing, having apparently sacrificed himself in the final operation which sent Imperial Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen) into exile in a galaxy far, far away. Sabine, who had previously been training with Ahsoka, feels heartbroken and betrayed in the aftermath of the war, while Hera, an ace pilot who fought with the Rebellion, is now a New Republic general. Ahsoka travels with Huyang (voiced by David Tennant), a thousand-year-old droid rescued from the ruins of the Jedi Temple, but her own attitude towards the Jedi remains ambivalent. But she does suspect that a group of defeated Imperials is trying to rescue Thrawn from exile, which is confirmed when Jedi-turned-mercenary Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson) rescues Nightsister Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto) from New Republic captivity. Meanwhile, Sabine is convinced that tracking the Force witch’s movements are the best way to get Ezra back, if he is still alive. Hera is unable to convince the war-weary New Republic to commit assets to the search, so she, Ahsoka, and Sabine set out alone to track down a star map to the distant space whale graveyard where they suspect Thrawn and Ezra have gone.

If all that sounds confusing (Space whales? Yes, they’re a thing.), then you’ve identified the first problem with Ahsoka. After 40 years of movies, comics, novels, and TV series, Star Wars is currently suffering from a bad case of Marvel-itis, where the needs of maintaining the increasingly convoluted continuity take up all available narrative time between the wham-bam space battles and lightsaber duels. Much of the charm of The Mandalorian was that it positioned itself as a monster-of-the-week series apart from the main story. In later seasons, when Luke Skywalker showed up, things went downhill fast.

Ahsoka and Thrawn are both genuinely great characters, but the series gets bogged down in Easter eggs and barely comprehensible lore. Dawson, a legend in her own right, gives an uncharacteristically reserved performance as Ahsoka. (In flashbacks, Ariana Greenblatt portrays young Ahsoka and nails the mischievous spirit Eckstein brought to the role.) Winstead is, as usual, the best thing on-screen, while Stevenson (in his last role before dying in May) understands the level of camp required of a serial villain.

But the biggest problem with Ahsoka is the direction. ILM’s special effects and production design are, as usual, absolutely top-notch, and with the level of acting firepower at his fingertips, Filoni should be able to craft some quality space opera. Yet the bread resolutely fails to rise. The patient, indie-film-inspired editing that works in the political thriller Andor sucks the life out of Ahsoka. The dialogue has been bad even by Star Wars standards. Things liven up when Thrawn arrives in episode 6, but with only two episodes left, it might be too little, too late. Maybe Ahsoka is right, and the Jedi are the problem.

Ahsoka is streaming on Disney+.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Daredevil

Marvel’s Daredevil: Season One (2015; various dirs., including Phil Abraham, Farren Blackburn and Brad Turner)— Although it eventually succumbs to its own primal fan-service instincts and climaxes with a final-episode alley brawl between two grotesque, guilt-wracked gargoyles seeking imaginary control over a city they will never truly own, Drew Goddard’s brutal, film noir-inflected 13-episode Daredevil reimagining is, along with Iron Man 3, Guardians of the Galaxy and Jessica Jones, one of the smartest and most rewarding recent additions to the oh-God-will-it-ever-stop-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Set in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, the show’s visual scheme is typically dark and atypically striking; so many scenes and framings recall writer/penciller Frank Miller’s influential work on the Daredevil comic in the early 1980s that it’s easy to imagine the whole production team poring over individual panels from those issues every night and then re-decorating the sets for maximum angular moodiness the following day. The show’s cinematographic signature is an invasive, piss-yellow light that leaks down rain-slicked streets and into shadeless tenement windows.

Daredevil’s first nine or so episodes display unusual courage and tenacity in that they refuse to let the titular hero—a.k.a. blind, combat-savvy vigilante Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox)—off the hook for his actions. While the show has plenty to say about fatherhood, the sins of the past, and an individual’s ability to change a system from either within or without, its central question—and the only superhero question that truly interests me anymore—is “Why would someone take to the streets as a masked crime-fighter in the first place?” In spite of the massive institutional corruption in and around Hell’s Kitchen, why does Matt bother working within the law as a criminal defense attorney by day if he’s going to subvert his beliefs in rules, regulations and due process at night? If he’s going to spend his evenings pummeling thugs and breaking bones before staggering home to stitch himself up, where will he draw the line?

Such questions plague Murdock and hamper his already-aloof relationships with his partner Foggy Nelson (Elden Hanson), his secretary Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll) and a compassionate nurse named Claire (Rosario Dawson). Yet Cox’s handsome, smallish Murdock remains unreachable; he’s only really alive during the regular after-hours missions that are one-third personal penance, one-third suicide attempt and one-third (I’m so sorry, everyone) blind rage. His spinning kicks, flips and acrobatics throughout the many unusually well-choreographed fight scenes compare favorably with Gina Carano’s work in Stephen Soderbergh’s great Haywire. And, almost unique among today’s superheroes, he never escapes unscathed. This masked man bleeds. A lot.

As Murdock’s rich and powerful nemesis Wilson Fisk, Vincent D’Onofrio feasts on the huge slabs of supervillainy-glazed ham thrown his way. His Fisk is a giant, glabrous, all-powerful baby overdressed for picture day and simmering with barely suppressed rage and pain that nearly shoot out of his ears like cartoon steam whenever he loses control. D’Onofrio dramatizes Fisk’s moral dilemmas by making every sentence he utters a clenched-throat combination of measured negotiations and hissing threats. As unsettling as Fisk in the flesh is, he is more frightening earlier in the series, when he exists only as an idea, a phantom, or a voice on a walkie-talkie.

Episode highlights include “Cut Man,” (the one with the astonishing single-take fight scene that I love without reservation), “World on Fire,” (the one that has the only Matt Murdock POV shot) and, best of all, “Stick” (the one guest-starring an inconceivably leathery and ornery Scott Glenn as Murdock’s mentor). The new season airs on Netflix March 18; here’s hoping its rehabilitation of the Punisher and Elektra is as successful as its resurrection of Kingpin and “The Man Without Fear.”

Grade: A- 

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Film Features Film/TV

Sin City: A Dame To Kill For

The modern era of digital cinema that began 21 years ago with Steven Spielberg’s photorealistic dinosaurs in Jurassic Park came of age in 1999 with Star Wars:The Phantom Menace. At the time, George Lucas said he believed digital cinema would allow filmmakers to work in a more “painterly” fashion. No longer constrained by what they could make happen in front of a camera in a real space, directors could let their images run wild. Many subsequent big budget science fiction and fantasy films, such as Alphonso Cuarón’s Gravity, have had more in common with animation than with traditional narrative cinema. But animators have from the beginning been willing to push their form to its limits, while films that starred humans have almost always focused on looking believable, especially if the stories they told were fantastic.

Among the very few who are willing to test the visual extremes that digital cinema could achieve is Robert Rodriguez. The man who once sold his body to medical experiments to finance El Mariachi now commands a legion of digital artists, and he has no compunctions about deploying them aggressively. In Sin City, his 2005 collaboration with comics old master Frank Miller, he made one of the few comic book movies that actually looked like a comic book. He put Miller’s visually striking, hard-boiled world in motion, and catapulted Jessica Alba to the A-list in the process. Sin City had no interest in photorealism, and its striking black-and-white compositions are like nothing else before or since. The sequel, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, often equals the original’s visual bravado, but ultimately falls short of its potential.

Reprising their roles from the original are Alba as Nancy, the stripper with a heart of gold; Mickey Rourke as Marv, the musclebound psycho with a heart of gold; Rosario Dawson as Gail, the warrior prostitute with a heart of gold, and Powers Boothe as Senator Roark, Sin City’s crime patriarch with a heart of lead. Newcomers this time include Eva Green as Ava, the titular dame to kill for; Jeremy Piven as a wisecracking detective; and Joseph Gordon Levitt as Johnny the supernaturally lucky gambler. A series of cameos include Bruce Willis as the ghost of Hartigan, the last good cop in Sin City who was killed off in the last installment; and Christopher Lloyd as an underworld doctor.

Like the original, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is episodic. But the 2005 installment’s brutal short stories added up to a satisfying whole, while the sequel is an incoherent mess. Comics are the ultimate auteur’s medium, and having total control over every aspect of a world seems to drive creators insane in a special way. They retreat into the fantasy worlds they create and lose sight of what it means to be an ordinary human. That’s why the deep empathy of comics artists such as Scott Pilgrim’s Brian Lee O’Malley are so treasured. Even in today’s comics-obsessed cinema, Edgar Wright’s 2010 O’Malley adaptation, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, is one of the few films outside of the Sin City franchise to go outside the realm of the real, pointing a way forward for comic book moves.

But A Dame To Kill For‘s Miller-penned script points only backwards. The exaggerated noir tropes that were fun in 2005 are just grindingly grim now. All of the men are hard-drinking, scrappy fighters motivated by revenge. All of the women are burlesque dancers, whores, or femme fatales, which is to say, in Miller’s mind, all the same. Everyone swigs vodka straight from the bottle and rockets around in awesome vintage carts before getting thrown from windows by invincible foes until it becomes hard to care about who’s doing what to whom. Miller’s comic works, which include Batman: The Dark Night Returns and The 300, have been hugely influential on both comics and film, but A Dame To Kill For cements Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises as the last good grimdark comic movie, and no amount of hoochie dancing or beheadings can save it from a descent into tedium.