The Last Jedi (2017)

The Last Jedi (2017)

Director: Ryan Johnson

Cast: Daisy Ridley, Mark Hammill, Carrie Fisher, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, Andy Serkis, Lupita Nyongo, Laura Dern, Benicio del Toro

Anticipation is always high for any Star Wars movie and The Last Jedi wasn’t going to be the exception. People just can’t wait for that Star Wars logo to flash on the screen while John William’s legendary score blasts through the speakers, it just starts things out with such a blast! Of course, I was as excited as everybody else. Where the hell was Rey and Finn’s story going to go? Who’s going to go bad, who’s going to “turn”? The interesting thing about this particular Star Wars sequel was that directors were going to change. J.J. Abrams passed the baton to Ryan Johnson who took the reins of the series with relentlessness. I wasn’t floored when I heard that Johnson had gotten the gig because to be honest, I’m not a huge fan of Brick (2005) or The Brothers Bloom (2008). The only light at the end of his cinematic repertoire was a film called Looper (2012) which I did enjoy a whole lot. So, where would a new voice, a new director/writer take the series? I was extremely curious.

This time around, the rebels are escaping the ever-nearing death grip of The New Order. After the destruction of Star Killer Base, the Order is desperate to wipe out the last remaining members of the Rebel Alliance. But rebels are not so easy to kill. Meanwhile, Rey is trying to convince Luke to rejoin the fight, to lead, to train more Jedi. Sadly, Luke has all but given up on the force and the training of Jedi. He wants none of the responsibility. Will Rey convince him to come out of seclusion?

When I say that Johnson took the franchise relentlessly, I mean it. It feels as if its writer/director, Ryan Johnson is scrapping everything J.J. Abrams set up in The Force Awakens (2015) and doing his own thing. And by scrapping, I mean, completely obliterating a lot of what makes The Force Awakens what it is. So creatively speaking, that was so interesting. The Last Jedi is the polar opposite of what The Force Awakens was. If Force Awakens was giving fans everything they wanted, then The Last Jedi is defying what you expected from this sequel. It’s almost as if Johnson is saying, if we follow what Abrams set up, we’ll end up seeing the exact same films we’ve already seen. And Johnson obviously doesn’t want that, so he’s shaking things up almost to the point of starting anew. And I must admit, I dug this direction Johnson took a whole lot. With this movie, you’ll feel like no one is safe. It’s not like when you’re watching a movie and you know nothing is going to happen to the good guys, so let’s just enjoy how they go about doing what they got to do. Nope, in The Last Jedi you will feel like every single person on the screen is in danger of being obliterated, or killed or blasted into infinity by some freaking giant laser. In that sense, for me, the film succeeds. It takes away that feeling of safety towards the characters.  

The film succeeds in many other ways as well. It is a darker chapter in the franchise and in this way it is similar to The Empire Strikes Back (1980), but it’s not as blatant as The Force Awakens was with its fan service. This isn’t a Xerox copy of The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi, though we hear and see echoes of both films. So it gives you a bit of that familiarity, but without becoming fan service, which was what The Force Awakens was guilty of. The Last Jedi has many new things going for it, old fans will be thrilled at how well they go about explaining exactly what The Force is but will also be surprised at the additions that Johnson makes to the mythology.  

Thematically speaking the film is all about the new wanting to stamp out the old, trying to forget it, leave it behind to start anew, which is kind of what the entire film attempts to do as well. I thought it was amazing how the film was mimicking what its characters were feeling. I loved where the characters were going and was surprised at every characters story arc and ultimate fate. I mean, Rey and Kilo, awesome! Snoke! Leia! Finn! Poe! So cool to see them all going through their own intense thing and then coming together in the grand finale. With each passing movie I love Rey even more. The new characters like Rose and Benicio del Toro’s DJ were welcome additions. I was especially proud of Benicio’s performance because he is one of Puerto Rico’s best actors, and he's up there in Star Wars and he represents. So, cool for Benicio!   

 The film is like a long trip you don’t want to end. When I thought it was just about to be over, boom, it wasn’t and a whole other chapter opens, and it’s also awesome. Final thoughts on The Last Jedi is that yes, it’s a very satisfying sequel. It is a dark chapter that shakes things up like crazy and attempts to put our characters in an incredibly difficult situation, therefore it is going to polarize audiences. Some will love it, others will hate it, or perhaps even find it “boring”, though honestly, I can’t agree one parsec with them. I kept thinking, boy, whoever ends up directing the next one is going to have a hard time doing it because this Ryan Johnson guy just left things in pretty dire straits! Ryan Johnson was like a hurricane that just passed through the Star Wars universe and left said universe in tatters. Where are these characters headed now? That’s what I want to know! We have to wait a couple of years to find out, so patience my young Padawan’s. Patience.

Ratings: 5 out of 5  

  

Behind the Scenes Awesomeness! Jurassic Park Franchise Edition!

Now this is filmmaking! 

Stan Winston, the main man behind the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park

Spielberg, a master at directing children

Wild (2014)

Title: Wild (2014)

Director: Jean-Marc Vallee

Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern

Wild is the story of Cheryl Strayed, a woman who falls into heroin addiction and furthermore, becomes sexually promiscuous in order to deal with her mother’s death. After reaching an all time low by becoming a town whore and getting pregnant in the process, she decides it’s time to do something with her life in order to straighten things out.  She decides to go hiking for three months in order to ‘find herself’ and eradicate her heroin addiction. Can she survive on her own for three months in the wilderness and kick her heroin addiction? And will Reese Witherspoon win an Oscar for this role?

I did some surfing on the net, trying to scope the general reaction for this film and discovered (to my surprise) that some folks seem to be disappointed by this film because they find it “to simple of a movie”. That it’s just about Reese Witherspoon walking around remembering the events that led her to heroin and sex addiction. That it’s not worthy of a movie, that it’s an ego trip for Reese Witherspoon. I guess those folks just don’t get it. I mean, yes, they are right; this is a film about a woman walking and remembering, but to these sentiments I say, what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with a film about analyzing ourselves? So obviously, Wild is not a movie for everyone, especially not those expecting special effects, action or impossible situations. No, this movie is more of an introspective tale, a spiritual journey of self discovery, so be ready for that.  

How personal is this story? Well, it’s based on Cheryl Strayed’s book Wild: From Lost to Found in the Pacific Crest Trail, which she mostly wrote as she hiked the trail herself. This is why we hear a lot of inner monologue through out the film, we here Cheryl’s thoughts as she is hiking, which made perfect sense to me. When  you hike for as long as she did, it’s just you, the road, nature and your mind. So what the director was doing here was capturing the experience of hiking on film; the loneliness, the beauty of nature, the grandness of the landscape and the inevitable tendency to get introspective, to reanalyze your life; where you've been, where you’re going, what does it all mean? We also get a glimpse at the whole hiker community, a whole different lifestyle that you've probably never gotten a glimpse at. It’s these elements that make this film unique. A good movie should capture the experience it’s trying to represent on film in a convincing manner and director Jean-Marc Vallee did just that, so kudos to him for it.

I like spiritual tales like this one. They are about people trying to connect with themselves, with the universe, trying to find the goodness in life by disconnecting from all the crap that society has to offer. Let’s face it, the world we live in offers some really crappy solutions to the sameness of it all. Once you grow tired of your repetitive life, of your problems, it’s easy to turn to drugs and alcohol to escape it all. What I liked about this movie is that it was Cheryl looking to escape from the escapes, if that makes any sense at all. She’s cuts with the world and with everyone in it in order to hear her own voice. That’s worthy of a movie for me, it’s a worthwhile story to tell. It reminded me a bit of Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007), though they are different films because Into the Wild was more about a man looking to completely disconnect from the modern life, completely giving his back to society and the modern world. Wild is more about escaping it all for a while, punishing your body a bit, showing it who is boss; taking a breather from the modern world in order to return to the battle and start again. But they share that idea of disconnecting, leaving all the noise of the world behind. Hiking for three months in the wild is no piece of cake; it takes a special kind of determination and will power and yes, inner strength to do it. Even more interesting is the fact that Cheryl Strayed did this without any prior experience in trail hiking!

Reese Witherspoon (left) and Cheryl Strayed (right)

Reese Witherspoon has gotten an Oscar nomination for her work in this film, but she has to go up against some stiff competition. She's going up against Julianne Moore for Still Alice, Rosamund Pike for Gone Girl, Felicity Jones for Theory of Everything and Marion Cotillard for Two Days, One Night. I guess we’ll see if she has what it takes to win, I thought her performance was excellent but I haven’t seen the competing films, so here’s hoping. I enjoy films like this one, they talk about life and how all of us deal with it in different ways. Some say big deal, we all got problems and they don’t make a movie about them. We all lose our mothers; we don’t all turn to promiscuous sex and drugs to deal with it; to that I say we don’t all react the same way when we lose someone close to us, some of us go on just fine, others break down. Each of our stories is different, they could make a movie about all of our lives, each one would be entirely different, each one would teach us a little something about the world we live in. This is Cheryl Strayeds story, and we can learn just as much from it as well. It’s a story about loss and redemption, told in a beautiful and sometimes poetic way, definitely worth a watch.

Rating: 5 out of 5   

Wild at Heart (1990)

Title: Wild at Heart (1990)

Director: David Lynch

Cast: Nicholas Cage, Laura Dern, Diane Ladd, Willem Dafoe, Isabella Rossellini, Grace Zabriskie

“This World is Wild at Heart and Weird on Top” is the defining quote in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, this shouldnt surprise anyone considering how the strangeness of the world is one of David Lynch’s favorite themes, for example, he also addressed it in Blue Velvet (1986), another film that spoke about the dark strange underbelly of the world. Wild at Heart is a film about a couple trying to hide away from the craziness of the world, trying to run away from it. They desperately want happiness, and constantly look for it, but Lula and Sailor seem destined to failure somehow. Lula and Sailor both come from dysfunctional families, Sailor says he never had any “parental guidance” and Lula, well; she has the mother from hell. When we first meet Sailor, he is being picked up by Lula, on the day he is being released from jail, which immediately lets us see Sailor isn’t an angel; so we’re not exactly talking about two wholesome characters here.  Yet, these two trouble makers have true love for each other, it’s intense, pure, real, so much so that Lula is constantly afraid that something will “jinx” their happiness. The “strange world” is a constant threat to their blissfulness.

There are many scenes in Wild at Heart that are simply there to accentuate how strange the world is. For example, there’s this scene in which Lula and Sailor are staying on this motel in the middle of nowhere, and they decide to take some fresh air by having a drink with some of the tenants of the motel and boy, this group of people they meet are class-A, bonafide weirdoes! On top of things some people are shooting a porn film with obese women on one of the rooms of the motel and suddenly a bunch of obese naked ladies pop into the scene! That’s when it dawns on you that you’re in David Lynch land!  He also revisits the theme of an evil controlling mother figure in the form of “Lula’s Momma”, a.k.a. Marietta Fortune, played by an intense Dianne Ladd, she gets so psychotic at times! At one point she smothers her entire face in lipstick because she’s so angry! By the way, I’ll just make a quick note here and point out that Dianne Ladd plays Lula’s mother in the film, but she’s also Laura Dern’s real mom! So it’s one of those special occasions where real life mother and daughter get to work together on a film;  this parental connection between actresses brings an additional emotional impact to their performances; Lynch knew what he was doing. But just how weird is this movie you ask? Well, it's so weird that test audiences demanded the film to be trimmed down during a scene that is by far the epitome of weirdness; it's a scene between Grace Zabriskie and Harry Dean Stanton, it involves an orgasm and a murder, but I'll let you discover what that scene is all about for yourselves.   

One of the things that makes this film work so well is the chemistry between Nicholas Cage and Laura Dern; Lula and Sailor, wow, what a couple! They exude sensuality, love, and true devotion to one another, but they also have a rebellious edge to them. As a spectator, you know these two people are rebels and trouble makers, they love to hang out at heavy metal bars, dancing to the music of a band called ‘Power Mad’! Lula doesn’t listen to her momma even though Sailor is obviously bad news; you see, Sailor has a tendency towards bar fights and manslaughter! He is also the biggest Elvis fan which I'm sure had something to do with Nicholas Cage who is also himself a huge Elvis fan. In a way Lula and Sailor remind me of these classical rebellious couples like Mickey and Mallory from Natural BornKillers (1994), only less murderous and insane. Thing is that even though Lula and Sailor aren’t squeaky clean characters, you get to like them anyways, Lula comes off as slightly naïve, while Sailor is the quintessential bad boy with a heart of gold. They come off as the kind of couple that is perfectly in tune with each other, their respective lives going down the same exact rode. Their passion is often times alluded to through images of fire and heat, for example, while the two have sex, Lynch superimposes extreme close ups of matches being lit, cigarettes being smoked or entire houses burning down. When Lula gets aroused, she tells Sailor that she’s “hotter than Georgia asphalt”, so sensuality plays a big part on this film.

For some reason Lynch chose to mix Lula and Sailors story with an avalanche of references to The Wizard of Oz (1939), strangely enough it all fits perfectly with the story. For example, as Lula and Sailor run away from various things on their road trip, Lula imagines “the wicked witch of the west” following them closely behind, like an evil threat to their relationship; to make things worse, the wicked witch is her own mother! The Wizard of Oz references don’t stop there; there are talks of yellow brick roads, people wanting to go “somewhere over the rainbow”, even Toto figures into one of the conversations. It all makes perfect sense when we look at it from the perspective of the story, we can actually draw some interesting parallels between both films. For example, we could say that Lula and Sailor are going down the yellow brick road of life. Lula and Sailor have their very own wicked witch in the form of Lula’s over protective mother who looks at Lula through a crystal ball, a symbolism alluding to Lula’s momma watching every step Lula and Sailor take. The Wizard of Oz references go on all the way till the films end, so knock yourselves out trying to spot them!

The film is sprinkled with many cameos by actors who have participated in previous Lynch films, for example we get Jack Nance who played Henry in Eraserhead (1977), Isabella Rosellini who played Dorothy Vallens on BlueVelvet (1986) and Sheryl Lee who worked on Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), so you’ll see a bunch of Lynch familiars, but you’ll also see a couple of faces that you’d never seen before on a Lynch film, the most notable one being Willem Defoe playing ‘Bobby Peru’, another outstanding villain in David Lynch’s Rogues gallery. At the end of the day, Wild at Heart is a road trip movie about two lovers trying as best they can to eliminate evil forces from their lives, two people just trying to be happy, but not being very good at it because as the film will constantly remind us, this world is overpoweringly weird and we can sometimes find ourselves unwillingly entangled in its strangeness weather we want it or not.

Rating: 5 out of 5    

Laura Dern and Nicholas Cage fooling around on the set 

Blue Velvet (1986)

Title: Blue Velvet (1986)

Director: David Lynch

Cast: Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern, Kyle MacLachlan, Dean Stockwell, Brad Dourif, Jack Nance

Blue Velvet came around the time when Lynch was trying to bounce back from the financial disaster that was Dune (1984). Now if you ask me, I’m one of the ones that loves Lynch’s Dune, always have and always will, but more about that on my review for Dune! So for whatever the reason, audiences just didn’t engulf Lynch’s vision of Frank Herbert’s Dune universe. Did this mean Lynch was a bad director? Hell no, he’d already proven himself to be a force to be reckoned with Eraserhead (1977) and the incredibly moving The Elephant Man (1980), both mind blowing in their own ways. Dune was just a hiccup along the road. Dune tanking at the box office was not going to stop Lynch from making more movies. So, thanks to the benevolent help of producer extraordinaire Dino DeLaurentis, Blue Velvet got the green light. The trick to getting this film made was making it for very little. Blue Velvet was a risky picture to commit to because it dealt with both sex and violence and it was a very dark picture. Some sacrifices were going to have to be made if Blue Velvet was ever going to see the light of day, and so, with everyone getting a pay cut, Blue Velvet was made with a mere six million dollars.

On this film we meet Jeffrey Beaumont, a college kid who’s coming back home to see his father who’s suffered from a devastating stroke. While wandering through his old neighborhood, Jeffrey stumbles upon a human ear decaying on the grass. Jeffrey is a good natured kid; he has a very positive, generally happy outlook on life, you get the feeling that he hasn’t seen enough of the world to become bitter and angry. Jeffrey is also a naturally curious young man, so he picks up the ear and takes it to the police, who decide to investigate further. Problem is that Jeffrey thinks he can investigate faster on his own, so he takes it upon himself to go deeper down the rabbit hole. Where will his investigations take him, especially considering the strange world we live in?

Blue Velvet is all about sex and violence, and how sometimes both of these worlds can get entangled to the point where they are difficult to differentiate. At which point are you "roughing it up a little" during sex and at which point does sex become sadomasochistic? Jeffrey Beaumont is a character who is exploring his boundaries, he wants to see that dark side of life that he’s never seen, he wants to see what’s hidden underneath, the taboos, the things no one wants to talk about. This is one of the defining themes of this film; that maybe the picture perfect world we see in front of our eyes isn’t as picture perfect as we’d like to think. I loved how Lynch mixes snap shots of a suburban neighborhood, picket fences, flowers and shinny new cars, with the horrors that are hidden underneath it all. Here, Lynch shows society living a façade. On the surface we see beauty, but if we look just a bit deeper, we see there are some pretty nasty things going on in this world. An example of this is Jeffrey, walking about this grassy knoll only to find a dead, decaying human ear when he decides to look where he’s walking. There are many references to darkness beneath the light in the film, for example, we see the picture perfect neighborhood, while inside of the houses, people are watching violent mystery stories on television, alluding to humanities allure with violence.

On the sexual side of things is where Blue Velvet really takes off though. We are presented with Jeffrey Beaumont and his new girlfriend Sandy Williams (18 year old Laura Dern) both of whom represent innocence and purity. They are so pure that they can’t stop giggling all the time; they can’t help being excited by the mystery that’s unfolding before them, like two little kids. They learn the hard way that some things are better left alone. On Blue Velvet, Jeffrey’s “innocence” is corrupted when he meets Dorothy Vallens, played by Isabella Rossellini, a battered character that’s emotionally and psychologically broken. Rossellini conveys all these emotions wonderfully through her performance which comes off as a woman who can’t escape the darkness she’s in, she’s gone in too deep; to top things off, she’s grown into a masochist. This desire to get pleasure from pain comes as a shock to Jeffrey, who’s only about caring for others. While Jeffrey asks “are you okay?” to Dorothy, she asks him to hit her. So we have to diametrically opposed characters, attracting each other because of their differences. Jeffrey is attracted by Dorothy’s intensely erotic nature while Jeffrey’s tenderness is something new to her. He’s a good natured kid getting mixed up with a damaged soul.  So these two worlds are clashing with each other, there’s no way that Jeffrey is going to come out unharmed from all of this. Yet there’s nobility to Jeffrey. He doesn’t have to get mixed up in this, but he does, because he feels sympathy for Dorothy. By the way, this is a very vulnerable performance from Rossellini, she bares all in a character that’s worth exploring.

Enter Frank Booth, one of the most evil, dark, twisted characters you will ever meet on any film. He’s the kind of character that comes off as truly scary, Frank will make you scared of the idea that there are people like him roaming the world. Dennis Hopper delivers an amazingly demented performance, very intense. He represents the worst thing that a man can become and that’s abusive of women. And this is one of the most important questions the film asks: “Why are there people like Frank in the world?” There's a scene where we are in the backseat of a car as Frank Booth is driving, Dennis Hopper plays it so evil that you get this feeling that you do not want to be there! Why are their people so messed up that they have to abuse women? That they get pleasure out of inflicting pain? Men who have to show that they are the alpha males, that they are the ones with physical power and that they can abuse it. With Blue Velvet Lynch once again addresses the theme of psychologically and physically abused women. He also played with these themes in Inland Empire (2006) albeit in a slightly more surreal fashion, but it’s in Blue Velvet that he explores them most deeply. Isabella Rossellini is the poster child for abused women as Frank Booth is the poster child for abusive men. I did like how not all men are portrayed as abusive, because while Frank is all that can be evil about a man, Jeffrey is the complete opposite. He cares for women and wants to show them tenderness and care.  

Women have always made up a huge part of Lynch’s body of work. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) is yet another film about abused girls. Mulholland Dr. (2001) also centers on women. Same as Federico Fellini, women are a favorite topic of Lynch’s and same as many Fellini films, an admiration, an adoration of the female is felt. There are many other elements to Blue Velvet that will remind you that it’s a David Lynch film; the art direction, the colors in a room, the mellow lighting, the peculiar looking lamps; that droning sound and same as in many Lynch films, somebody singing a sad song from a stage will always figure into the story, in this case its Isabella Rosellini herself who will hypnotize you while singing ‘Blue Velvet’. Lynch’s love for a good mystery is also at the heart of Blue Velvet. We discover this intricate mystery as we follow Jeffrey, deeper and deeper into this dark, dark world. Also, there are wonderfully weird moments that will let you know you’re in Lynch territory, like this scene in which Dean Stockwell sings Roy Orbison's 'In Dreams', wow, now that's weird! These scenes will stir emotions in you that you didn’t know you could feel, and that’s what is so great about Lynch. He creates premises so strange, so surreal that they’ll trigger an emotional reaction out of you, even if you don’t fully comprehend what you are seeing. But speaking of coherence, Blue Velvet is actually one of Lynch’s most linear films; it just goes into really strange, dark places. But, like any good mystery, you’ll end up loving it and wanting to see it all the way through, like Jeffrey,  Lynch will turn you into a voyeur who can’t stop watching.  

Rating: 5 out of 5