One of the most famous quotes from the “Star Wars” saga must haunt the dreams of every director who signs on to make one of these continuing stories. “Do. Or do not. There is no try.” The “Star Wars” films aren’t simply a night out at the movies, they are part of the fabric of many people’s lives. Some take it VERY seriously. On a 2001 census 21,000 Canadians put down their religion as Jedi Knight. That is serious fandom.
Finding a balance between the nostalgia many aficionados hold for the iconic series and moving it forward in an entertaining and organic way is a juggling act, one that director Rian Johnson has pulled off in “Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi.”
Tried he did. Fail he did not.
Johnson, who has already been hired to pilot a new three-film “Star Wars” franchise, pushes the characters and the story into new territory while maintaining the gist of George Lucas’s vision.
Beginning immediately after the events of “The Force Awakens,” Force-sensitive Resistance fighter Rey (Daisy Ridley) is in the most “unknowable place in the galaxy,” the planet Ahch-To, home to the exiled Jedi Master (and Mister Miyagi stand in) Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). As she tries to convince him to train her in the ways of the Jedi, General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) and her Resistance do battle with the First Order, lead by the evil Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis) and his minions, General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) and Vader-wannabe Kylo Ren (Adam Driver).
Like the other films “The Last Jedi” is basically a tale of good versus evil. Snoke wants control of the galaxy while the Resistance is exposed and fighting back. It’s an echo of the original story but our real world has become a more complicated place since the first movie hit theatres and this movie reflects that. There have always been grey areas and nuance in the portrayal of heroes and villains in the franchise but here Kylo wrestles with primal urges. His leader Snokes, eggs him on—“Kylo you are no Vader,” he taunts. “You are just a child in a mask.”—as he battles with the yin and yang of his personality. That to and fro gives Driver the latitude to surprise the audience in ways (NO SPOILERS HERE!) that may shock even the most hardened fans.
Johnson has not simply remade “Empire Strikes Back,” he’s made a film that bristles with energy and invention. With one eye on the past and one to the future “The Last Jedi” finds a winning mix of humour and humanity, of old and new and good and evil.
When the talk of resistance and legacy of the Jedi threatens to weigh things down Johnson counters with some comic relief. It’s a treat to see Carrie Fisher in her last turn as Leia—the film is dedicated to her: “In loving memory of our Princess Carrie Fisher”—and Hamill with light sabre in hand but it’s the spirit of the thing that will please audiences. Although a tad long, “The Last Jedi” is a giddy, gripping good time.
Judy Greer wrote a charming, self-depreciating book called I Don’t Know What You Know Me From: Confessions of a Co-Star that chronicles her busy career as the second lead in dozens of movies and television shows like Jurassic World, Ant-Man, Arrested Development and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
She is, as her twitter bio reads, “that girl from that movie/tv show,” a familiar face on screens big and small. If you can’t place the face, perhaps you’ll recognize the voice. One of her longest running roles has her voicing the clingy and emotionally fragile Cheryl Tunt on the wildly popular adult animated spy sitcom Archer. For Greer herself the show has provided a career highpoint.
“I got to sign someone’s boobs at Comic-Con last year,” she says. “I think you’ve really made it if you have your own action figure and people want you to sign their boobs.”
There are other perks as well.
“I went to a dinner party recently, now I’m about to name drop, and Jon Hamm was there. He played a role on Archer but we don’t record together so I never get to meet anyone who does it. When I saw him he said, ‘God, I love your work on Archer and I love Archer so much I just wanted to be in it.’ That was so cool. That was a highlight. Jon Hamm and the boob signing. They work well in tandem. Maybe I’ll sign Jon Hamm’s boobs sometime!”
Her latest film, Wilson, gave her the chance to meet another of her favourite actors.
“I’m looking to work with people who inspire me. I’m pretty happy with the roles I‘m getting and I just want to work with more of my idols. I definitely checked that box with Woody [Harrelson].”
In the film Greer plays Shelly, a dog sitter who is one of the only people who finds the offbeat title character charming.
“There are a handful of actors who couldn’t play this role because you would hate them all the way through to the end. Woody himself is so lovely and wonderful that in the beginning when Wilson is kind of terrible Woody makes you root for him.
“After I saw the movie I found myself wanting to spend more time talking to people who irritate me,” she says. “Maybe that person is a Wilson and Wilson is great. I would want to hear Wilson’s opinion about things. Maybe I’m shutting people down too quickly. Maybe I need to give people who have strong opinions a little bit more of a minute in my life. Maybe there is something to be learned from them.”
The effervescent forty-one-year-old, who will next be seen in War for the Planet of the Apes, laughs when she says, “I felt strongly that [director] Craig [Johnson] would be making a huge mistake by not casting me.”
“Sometimes when I read something I fall in love with the character I’m going to play and sometimes I fall in love with the movie itself. In this case I fell in love with the whole movie, the script itself. I had to see this movie pop up for years to come and be so proud that I had a small piece of it. I wanted to do what I could to help Wilson and his story.”
Wilson, the titular character of the new Woody Harrelson dramedy, is the kind of unfiltered curmudgeon who calls his oldest friend a, “toxic, soul destroying vampire.”
He’s the kind of guy drives too slow on the highway and complains when people honk at him. “Everyone is in such a rush,” he harumphs.
He’s the kind of exasperating person who sits next to you on an empty train and then proceeds to ask deeply personal questions.
He’s the kind a guy who has probably been punched in the face, a lot.
But is he the kind of guy you want to spend 90 minutes with in the movie theater?
My answer would be no, but it really depends on whether you call his unfettered behaviour “open and fearless” or just plain rude.
Wilson is a square peg in the world of round holes, a man left alone and friendless when his father died and his only pal, Robert, moves away.
Convinced he must find a companion he tries to re-enter the dating pool. A couple of disastrous dates puts him on the trail of his ex-wife, a woman hasn’t seen in 17 years.
When she tells him she had their baby and put the little girl up for adoption, he insists on hunting her down in an attempt to form a lasting relationship. She is his legacy but her adoptive parents aren’t keen to have Wilson in their daughter’s life.
There’s more, but it would only lead you down the rabbit hole of Wilson’s off beat existence. No spoilers here.
“Wilson,” written by Daniel “Ghost World” Clowes and directed by Craig “The Skeleton Twins” Johnson, never quite finds the sweet spot between world weary versus depression, comedy versus tragedy. Harrelson and Co. play it at a heightened tone, only allowing dribs and drabs of real life to invade Wilson’s made up world.
The film trades on the theme that as people we are a fleeting, temporary presence in the world, soon to be forgotten.
“We want people to love us for who we are,” he says, “but that’s not possible because were all too unbearable.”
But just as that theme settles in Wilson, the man in the movie, shifts into a feel good mode that makes everything that came before seem a little like an elaborate but meaningless set up for some happy-making redemption. Everybody likes a happy ending, I know, but keeping true to Wilson’s crabby character and his journey would’ve been a more satisfying ride.
“99 Homes” is an angry movie. An examination of the personal cost of the 2010 real-estate collapse in Orlando, Florida, it bristles with rage at the fate of families thrown to the curb when banks foreclosed on their homes. It’s an ugly story and one that should serve as a cautionary tale.
Andrew Garfield is Dennis, a construction Jack of All Trades who borrowed $85,000 against the value of his home to start his own company. When the economy went south, so did his company. Soon Richard Carver (Michael Shannon) a predatory real estate flipper with a steely gaze and an electronic cigarette is at the door with an eviction notice. Within minutes Dennis, his son (Noah Lomax) and mother (Laura Dern) are homeless.
“I didn’t kick you out,” he says to Dennis as movers empty the house. “The bank did. I just represent them.”
With no job, no house and no prospects, Dennis makes a deal with the devil and begins assisting Carver with evictions and semi-legal wheeling and dealing. It’s a Faustian deal to be sure, but soon Dennis is able to see light at the end of the tunnel, and maybe even earn his house back.
“99 Homes” features a gut wrenching eviction scene that establishes the tone for the rest of the film. It’s the stuff they don’t show you on reality flip shows, the personal, tragic side of foreclosure.
It’s not a subtle film. Shannon is entertaining as always, but the only thing missing from his take on Carver are devil horns and a red cape. He’s more a metaphor than a character. He’s the personification of capitalism run wild; an amoral businessman who ruthlessly exploited predatory lending, unfair mortgage rates, bailed-out banks to make a fortune for himself. In his wake is a trail of destruction, foreclosed homes and destitute families. “You get numb to it,” he says.
Garfield goes along for the ride, at least until his guilt gets the best of him. His character has the best story and character arc, but it’s the sheer power of Shanon’s menace that we’re paying to see.
“99 Homes” asks many questions, most notably, What would you do to keep a roof over your head? The answer lies somewhere between the film’s moralizing and melodrama, serving as a cautionary tale of a terrible time in our recent history.
“Wild,” the new film from Jean-Marc Vallée, the Academy Award nominated director of “Dallas Buyer’s Club,” is a road movie. Or rather, a path movie as star Reese Witherspoon hardly spends any of her 1000-mile journey from Mojave Desert to Canada on an actual road.
Witherspoon is Cheryl Strayed, a literate young woman whose life spins out of control after a family tragedy. To ease her pain she steps outside of her marriage to Paul (“The Newsroom’s” Thomas Sadoski) and into a world of booze, drugs and anonymous sex. She calls herself an experimentalist—the “girl who says yes instead of no”—but when she hits rock bottom she runs away from the past toward an uncertain future, cleansing herself and her soul with a 1000-mile trek on the Pacific Crest Trail. “I’m obsessive,” she says, “but this is stretch for me.”
Most road movies are linear. They start at point ‘a’ and by the time the main character is at point ‘z’ they have undergone a spiritual journey as well as a physical one. In “Wild” Cheryl moves continuously moves forward but the story jumps to-and-fro with flashbacks to her childhood and drug fuelled past. The fractured timeline supplies an impressionistic look at Cheryl’s life, as though we are sifting through her memories, looking for clues as to why she ended up on the trail.
It’s a dreamily effective way to tell her story. Filled with happiness, pain, sorrow and more melancholy than a Patsy Cline ballad, it feels like a life on parade. Like puzzle pieces the snippets piece together to eventually form a whole.
The story of Cheryl’s physical survival—too tight boots, toenail trauma, dehydration—is less interesting than her quest for emotional survival. Witherspoon is best not when she’s fumbling with a bowl of “cold mush” or a broken propane heater, but when she puts herself “in the way of beauty, to become the woman her mother (a terrific Laura Dern) said she could be.” Mom told her to “find your best self and hold on to it,” which is not only good advice but also gives Witherspoon the chance to dig deep to find the character.
She can play the comedic bits—struggling with a backpack twice as big as her and being mistaken for a “lady hobo”—but it’s the sensitive stuff that hits home here.
It’s too bad that the movie, in its last thirty minutes, doesn’t trust the audience to process what it just saw. Near the end spirit animals appear and Witherspoon’s narration recaps her journey. Unless you walk in during the movie’s last act you already know everything about the journey and don’t need a summary.
Luckily the last few minutes also contain a scene so strange and emotional it rescues it from tipping over into sentimentality. Walking along the path, almost at her destination, Cheryl encounters a young boy and his grandmother. After some conversation the lad sings a verse or two of “Red River Valley” and provides the movie with one of its quietly emotional highlights.
Metro’s Reel Guys columnists Richard Crouse and Mark Breslin take a look at this year’s crop of potential crowd pleasers at the festival.
Richard: Mark, every year I look forward to covering the festival with a mix of dread and anticipation. The dread part comes from knowing how I’m going to feel once the 10 days of 18-hour shifts is finally over. The drooling anticipation part comes along with the slate of films TIFF offers up. This year the new David Cronenberg film is top of my list. In Maps to the Stars, he showcases the stupid, venal and stratospherically self-involved behaviour that goes on behind the scenes in Beverly Hills’ gated communities. The idea of debuting a jaundiced look at Hollywood at the biggest film festival in North America appeals to my rebellious side.
Mark: Can’t wait, Richard, for this or any other Cronenberg! I’m also a big fan of Jason Reitman, who consistently delivers movies that plumb the abyss of the zeitgeist. His latest, Men, Women, and Children, should be no exception. Based on one of my favourite novels by Chad Kultgen, it’s a look at how the Internet is warping families, twisting our sexuality and mediating our desires. Oh, and it’s a comedy.
RC: Mark, the sci-fi musical genre has been sadly overlooked at TIFF in past years. That changes with Bang Bang Baby, starring Jane Levy as a 1960s teenager whose dreams of rock ’n’ roll stardom are dashed when a chemical leak in her town causes mass mutations and “threatens to turn her dream into a nightmare.” Then there’s The Editor, a giallo-comedy tribute to the films of Mario Bava and Dario Argento about a one-handed film editor who becomes the prime suspect in a brutal series of murders.
MB: Sounds great, Richard! I’ll stand in line to see the new Denys Arcand film, An Eye For Beauty. Here’s a director not afraid to take a satirical look at our modern mores, but he’s never tackled a love story before. Some of it takes place in Toronto, so I’m expecting a sly gimlet-eyed view from this great Québécois director.
RC: Speaking of great Québécois directors, Jean-Marc Vallée, the Canadian Oscar nominee for Dallas Buyers Club, returns to TIFF with Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon in the story of a woman who finds an escape from her self-destructive ways on a 1,100-mile solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail. I’m also psyched about Haemoo. With a script by Snowpiercer penner Bong Joon-ho, this movie about a fishing crew smuggling illegal immigrants from China to Korea promises wild action and unexpected thrills.
MB: Richard, do you realize all our picks inadvertently turned out to be Canadian directors? I’m looking forward to Black and White by Mike Binder. It promises to be a heartfelt drama about an interracial family with issues. Binder is from Detroit but went to summer camp in Muskoka, so he qualifies as an honorary Canuck.
The first five-hankie film of the year, “The Fault in Our stars” is an adolescent “Love Story.” Based on John Green’s young adult novel about two teenagers who fall in love after meeting in a cancer support group, it’s a tearjerker that has been making teenage girls spout tears like water shooting from fire hydrants since its release in 2012.
“Divergent” star Shailene Woodley plays Hazel Grace Lancaster, a sixteen-year-old first diagnosed with cancer when she was thirteen. An experimental treatment has given her some semblance of a normal life, but the cancer is now in her lungs and she relies on a portable oxygen tank to keep her alive. “My lungs suck at being lungs,” she says, “but theoretically they should work for a while.”
Fearing that the young girl is spending far too much time alone compulsively reading a cancer memoir called An Imperial Affliction, her parents Frannie and Michael (Laura Dern, Sam Trammell), push her towards a support group for kids with cancer at a local church.
There she meets Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort), a handsome eighteen-year-old former athlete who lost a leg to osteosarcoma. He falls for her but she keeps him in the friend zone in an attempt to protect him from what she sees as an unhappy ending to their potential romance. “I’m a grenade,” she says, “and one day I’m going to explode and obliterate everything in my wake and it is my responsibility to minimize the causalities.”
It sounds like it has all the elements of a major summer bummer, but despite being set in what Hazel calls the “Republic of Cancervania,” it avoids the maudlin. Instead the story is told with acerbic wit, filtered through the life experiences of characters who have rarely known a healthy day. In the film’s opening minutes Hazel says she doesn’t live in a world where “nothing is so messed up it can’t be fixed by a Peter Gabriel song,” suggesting that there won’t be any easy answers offered up here.
Spearheading the uniformly excellent cast is Woodley who strays into Jennifer Lawrence territory here. Her Hazel is a realist, with a fatalistic streak, but still a teen and Woodley finds a balance between those aspects of Hazel’s life and personality in a remarkably complex but natural performance. She’s wry, calling herself the “Keith Richard of cancer kids” while inventorying her daily intake of drugs. But she’s also wise beyond her years. On her parent’s struggle she says, “The only thing worse than biting it from cancer,” she says “is having a kid bite it from cancer.”
As a terminally ill girl who lets down walls to let love into her life Woodley drips with charisma. Her performance—with capable assistance from Elgort and Dern—brings genuine emotion to scenes that might have gone the way of over-the-top sentimentality or cliché.
It’s true that some of the dialogue is overwritten—these are the most articulate teens on film since Juno—and the second half succumbs to a hint of emotional manipulation, but it works.
My biggest complaint about the whole experience was being splashed by the tears of my fellow moviegoers. Bring a towel.
Chances are you’ve already seen the latest 3D action adventure movie lumbering toward theatres this weekend. “Jurassic Park’s” DNA’d dinos originally scared the spinosaurus out of people in 1993, but has been updated—except for excited references to interactive CD-ROMs—with the addition of stereoscopic imagery. It’s a blast from the Mesozoic past with 3D dinosaurs.
A refresher for those used to fast forwarding to the exciting bits: Set in a time when CD ROMs aren’t the culture’s biggest scientific advance, the action begins when billionaire John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) invites his two grandchildren, Tim (Joseph Mazzello) and Lex (Ariana Richards) and a group of scientists (Sam Neill and Laura Dern), lawyer Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero) and a mathematician (Jeff Goldblum) to his new biogenetics theme park, Jurassic Park, located on a remote island off the coast of Costa Rica.
The park’s big draw are real brachiosaurs, triceratops, velociraptors and Tyrannosaurus Rexes grown from long-dormant dino DNA molecules taken from dinosaur-biting prehistoric insects preserved in amber.
It’s all fun and games until an underhanded employee (Wayne “Newman” Knight) hatches a plan to steal dinosaur embryos. His plan goes awry and soon hungry dinosaurs are on the rampage, snacking on lawyers and hunting the kids!
For a period piece–this year marks its twentieth anniversary—“Jurassic Park” is still a pulse pounder. Twenty years ago the special effects that gave us the lifelike dinosaurs made our eyeballs dance. Today we don’t notice the computer generated magic as much and can allow ourselves to be swept away by the thriller and horror aspects of director Steven Spielberg’s vision.
After an opening that relies too heavily on exposition—show me, don’t tell me!—the movie’s pleasures reveal themselves when Spielberg’s impeccable sense of timing comes into play. The now legendary trembling glass of water scene—ripples slowly appear as a T-Rex approaches—is as exciting now as it was two decades ago.
The question here is whether or not a film like “Jurassic Park” is improved by the addition of 3D bells and whistles. The real answer is no, but the movie remains an adrenaline rush and a treat to see back where it belongs, on the big screen.
