The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966)

3/4 stars

Screwball comedies are a difficult form of art. To put so much chaos on screen and to allow it to escalate requires a great deal of careful orchestration to pull it off effectively. In a word, portraying chaos demands everything but chaos in the screenwriters room. What’s needed is a lot of comedic timing, tight physical choreography, firm character establishment, and diligent direction for the performers.
The Ghost and Mr. Chicken is one of the best and most successful examples of the genre. Masterpieces like Bringing Up Baby and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World make for stiff competition as classics; while this film, like its hero, is unfairly forgotten and unappreciated for the comic genius that went into its writing.

Luther Heggs (Don Knotts) is an excitable, easily frightened newspaper typesetter who isn’t taken seriously or respected much by anyone around him. His closest friends love his personality more than his intellect and his coworkers look down on him. He wants to be an ace reporter someday but his circumstances make this unlikely. He is the ultimate underdog.
The movie vitally establishes his lack of credibility in its opening scene. Luther overzealously pursues a story involving the sudden murder of the town drunk. He takes half a dozen pictures, questions the murder’s sole witness, and rushes to the police station to report the killing. Luther knows this is his ticket to becoming a reporter in his own right and his excitement has him so animated that he is barely able to get a comprehensible word out. The only problem is that the “victim” isn’t dead and soon walks into the police station in the middle of Luther’s statement. Luther is laughed out and has to the endure the following day a barrage of jokes at his expense from his family and colleagues.
Fortunately, Luther’s own mishap opens up an opportunity for a second chance. An old mansion known to the locals as the Simmons House is about to be demolished the following week by the owner. The place is the subject of local legends as the previous owners had been killed a few decades earlier. Its reputation for being haunted has given rise for tall tales of organ music played at midnight and ghostly laughter from its long dead occupants. The newspaper wants to capitalize on the story before the building is bulldozed and Luther is chosen to spend a single night in the place. As one of the paper’s head writers puts it they want someone who is “a bit of a coward” and prone to superstition to sleep at the place. It’s an old formula to haunted house movies, but the film makes comic gold out of it.
Luther reluctantly agrees and the night he spends there leaves him sufficiently traumatized. He hears cackling laughter in the walls, secret passages open before his eyes, a blood-stained organ plays by itself, and a portrait of the late Mrs. Simmons appears with a pair of pruning shears in the throat as blood flows from the canvas. While this sounds grim on paper, it is all played for laughs and Don Knotts’ physical and facial performance throughout the ordeal makes for some of the funniest scenes in the movie.
Luther’s story turns him into a local celebrity overnight. Everyone wants his autograph, men shake his hand, women fawn over him, and he gives painfully tepid and incoherent speeches to the crowds.
But, let me clarify this. Nothing that Luther saw and heard at the old Simmons place is what it seems. This becomes a serious problem when he and the newspaper are sued for libel by the house’s owner. Luther is impelled to prove in court that what he had witnessed really took place and he is forced to return to the house to recreate his movements and demonstrate what had happened. His own misapprehension over what he had seen works against him and he is made to look like a fool when he cannot replicate any of his claims to onlookers.
Of course, in the end Luther is vindicated in the midst of what becomes, surprisingly, a thoroughly engaging and interesting murder mystery.

Don Knotts, still fresh off his popularity on The Andy Griffith Show, brings to the role a hilarious portraiture of a man tightly wound up and intimidated by everything, including his own shadow. He can barely keep still as he fumbles around nervously trying to assert himself while nothing that happens to him seems to make sense. Knotts has a unique physicality to his performances in which he constantly reacts in sharp, jerky movements while his eyes are perpetually popping in fear. His is a role that I cannot picture any other comic actor of the time doing half so well. The Ghost and Mr. Chicken was made with Don Knotts clearly in mind and it remains one of his best and funniest movies.
I laugh at him, but root for him too. As an underdog he is innocent and good-natured, and his success at the end is satisfying and well-earned. Luther deserves to be happy and I was happy for him.

While classic Hollywood has plenty of superior screwball comedies to offer, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken remains a good one that merits more attention. It is uproariously funny, well-plotted, and cleverly performed throughout. While not overly ambitious or rife with social commentary, it is, nevertheless, an engaging simple story with plenty of laughs for any audience with a sense of humor. I recommend it highly. Tracking it down is worthwhile and it won’t disappoint.

Fly Away Home (1995)

4/4 stars

I am of the mind that there is no genre incapable of producing something good. Take the eco-conscious-child-bonds-with-a-wild-animal genre for instance. They were a dime a dozen in the 80s and 90s and the majority of its examples were utter dreck. Often over-sentimental and preachy, these kinds of movies too frequently end up saccharine and lacking in genuine human feeling. They aren’t hard to find. You can find them in any family movie pack in 5 dollar bargain bins.
Carroll Ballard’s (The Black Stallion) Fly Away Home is an example of the genre being treated with dignity and honest sentiment. The film is an emotionally moving picture that is not a mere environmental sermon or a cute animal movie. While these elements are there, Fly Away Home is more about the human experience. At its core, the movie preaches finding purpose after things we take for granted are taken away. This is a movie that keeps relatable human concerns at the foreground, supported by its green message instead of the other way around.

Amy Alden (Anna Paquin) is a 13 year old girl who, when her mother is killed in a car accident, is sent to Ontario to live with her father, Thomas (Jeff Daniels). She has not seen him in ten years and their interactions are awkward at first as she coldly tries to adjust to the sudden change in her life. Thomas is a socially-unaccustomed sculptor and aviation enthusiast who throws himself into his work. While he tries his best to keep his daughter comfortable there is a lack of connection and neither one of them is quite able to grasp the pain that each of them carries.
The first inkling of their developing bond comes when Amy discovers that he is involved with a local dispute with a real estate developer that threatens the wildlife community. At first, she claims to not care, but this quickly changes when she discovers a nest of goose eggs while playing hooky from school. The birds’ mother was killed by a bulldozer and Amy realizes that without her help the chicks will likely die. She hides the eggs in a drawer, but they are discovered by her father and his girlfriend Susan (Dana Delany) when they hatch.
The geese have since imprinted on Amy and they follow her everywhere believing her to be their mother. Thomas allows her to keep them despite the difficulties involved. His reasons for doing so are not stated explicitly, but I felt that he realized in that moment that Amy was overwhelmed by the loss of her mother and felt a kinship with the chicks on this basis. Amy is trying to live vicariously through the memory of her dead mom by being a mother herself to the birds in a way her own mother can no longer do for her. A forced separation would do only more psychological damage, and Thomas understands this.
But, caring for the fast-growing geese is not without complications. Geese have a natural instinct to fly south when winter comes, but require parental guidance to learn in which direction to go. Without parents geese under Canadian law must be rendered flightless by having their wings clipped, an operation that Amy strongly objects to.
Thomas, his brother David (Terry Kinney), and his assistant Barry (Holter Graham) hatch a plan to use airplanes to teach the geese to fly and guide them to South Carolina to migrate. This is complicated by the fact that the birds will only follow Amy and so Thomas decides to teach his daughter to fly and operate an airplane so they can make the flight together. There is a forgivable plothole here because, of course, all that needs to be done is craft a two-seater with Amy as a passenger. The birds would still follow. Ignoring this issue and moving on, two one-seater planes are built, both of which are fashioned to look like large geese.

Their flight is the highlight of the latter act of the film, bringing a highly emotional payoff to Amy and Thomas’s relationship with Caleb Deschanel’s gorgeous cinematography on full display. The natural Canadian landscapes are gloriously autumnal, shot in wide angles. The beauty of nature and its importance are ever-present in every shot of Fly Away Home and the fight for its survival is deliberately paralleled by the emotional drives of its human characters.
Mark Isham’s beautiful film score adds a sense of sadness and newfound joys to the film’s mood, with a recurring song (10,000 Miles) performed by Mary Chapin Carpenter that sets the movie’s themes of overcoming loss and finding hope afterward.
The film is a spiritual experience in which Man and Nature are not enemies at war with one another, but rather companions that share in and reflect each other’s griefs and influences. Environmentally-minded movies like this one are often angry or else limp and uninspired in presenting their message. Fly Away Home is neither. It takes the subject of human grief and gives us a place where it can be uplifted to new purpose. It doesn’t deny the reality of pain, but finds meaning in it.

While many family movies are cynically dumb and bankrupt of emotional depth, Fly Away Home demonstrates that they don’t have to be. There are too many good wholesome family movies to allow statements like “well, it’s a kids’ movie” to justify dimwitted schlock. I would encourage any parent the next time it is family movie night, instead of tormenting themselves with something obnoxious, loud, and thoughtless, to put this on. Children deserve good movies too.

The Fountain (2006)

3/4 stars

Visionary filmmaker Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain is a visual marvel offset by a shallow and unsubtle story. It succeeds as a thoughtful meditation on grief, but ultimately fails as a meditation on death. The film aims to accomplish both, but in the end the rich images and Hugh Jackman’s heart-wrenching performance serve to mask a weak narrative that lacks the sort of depth the subject matter demands.
The Fountain has unique and arresting imagery rife with symbols and allegories that, while beautiful, do not give the audience much to think about. The attempts at allegory here are often obvious and over-explained throughout the film’s beats.

Tommy Creo (Jackman) is a doctor engaged in cancer research which, for him, involves a great deal of personal investment as his wife Izzy (Rachel Weisz) is dying of the disease herself. She is a vague figure; an idea whose personal substance has faded from his memories. Her scenes are typically recollections of moments with her that he regrets or quiet images of happiness he once had. She is writing a novel called The Fountain about a Spanish conquistador named Tomas (also Jackman) who, on behalf of Queen Isabella (also Weisz), goes on a quest to the Americas to capture a legendary Mayan temple wherein lies the fabled Tree of Life which promises fountain of youth like powers. The story is set against a backdrop of inquisitions and religious persecution that only feebly tie to his quest. Symbolically the predations of the Spanish Inquisition and the vicious palace intrigue align with the march of death that threatens the life of the real-life Izzy, but within her novel’s context they are under-explained and function poorly as an impetus for the hero. Like her book, the film has a similar problem. All of the visual feasts of allegorical imagery are only sensible when viewed allegorically, but defy logic when examined at the parallel literal level. A good allegory mixes both perfectly, but The Fountain is too obsessed with its symbolism to spend much time on story.
Mixed between the content of Izzy’s novel and the real-life events happening to her and Tommy there is a third parallel plotline involving a vision of Tommy inside a bubble hurtling toward a nebula called Xibalba which, according to the Mayans, contains the abode of the dead. With him, in the bubble, is the Tree of Life itself, dying slowly in conjunction with the passing of Izzy. The vision of Tommy desperately tries to keep the tree alive, occasionally consuming its bark for its rejuvenative effects.
What the movie does best is capture Tommy’s grief and the fear that comes with it. Jackman’s performance is among some of his finest. He evokes pain and loss in a way that is so profoundly real it almost brings me to tears. Another thing The Fountain does that I appreciate is showing the experience of hyper-focusing on random still things when we are frightened and aggrieved over a pending loss. He stares at a ceiling light soaking it in as if there is nothing else in the universe; and he does it again in an elevator creating a huge gestalten image of its interior paneling until it becomes everything. It’s an experience that is difficult to explain to someone who has not felt it, and Aronofsky has found a brilliant way to bring it on screen visually that I have not seen in other movies dealing with the subject.
On top of these excellent qualities is Clint Mansell’s beautiful, funereal score which is among some of his best compositions alongside Requiem for a Dream.

The Fountain’s visual language is highly poetical. It’s images are like music that recreates strong feelings. But, it is like music with bad lyrics. The moments in which Tommy purportedly comes to terms with his wife’s death and the onset of his eventual own are not convincing and are highly contrived by the aesthetics. The film tells me he is over his terror of death, but it doesn’t make me feel it in the slightest. Unlike Aronofsky’s other much better films, The Fountain suffers from the disingenuousness of pretension.
Behind the film’s production was a number of budgetary issues that during pre-production nearly killed the project. Inevitably, Darren Aronofsky, opted to make the film on a smaller budget and a smaller scale of ambition. What was intended to be an epic became a 96-minute art-piece severely lacking the director’s usual profundity and symbolic detail. There was a great picture in the works here during the film’s early planning that evaporated during its execution. Had he made the picture after Black Swan we may have had the masterpiece he originally intended. Alas, what is left is a beautiful and elegiac film, marred by limitations that robbed it off subtlety.
In the end, The Fountain is a good movie. But, it could have been a great one.

Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993)

2/4 stars

Mel Brooks’ Robin Hood: Men in Tights is a movie that is good, but not good enough. It’s the sort of movie that a master comedian of Mel Brooks’ caliber cannot get away with. Not in the same way that the creators of Scary Movie or The Starving Games could have.
Against his previous offerings such as Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein, Men in Tights seems desperate in comparison. Comedy requires a skilled command of tight pacing or else the jokes start to live in a vacuum, like isolated entries in a joke book or a collection of comic strips. My experience of watching Robin Hood: Men in Tights was much like this. It opens at a breakneck rush before suddenly meandering into a collection of poorly interconnected gags that do nothing to serve the backdrop of the story or the characters. When the movie succeeded in getting a laugh out of me it’s always with a joke that could be placed in any other scene of the film, or even in another film altogether. Nothing funny in this movie comments on the story’s events or the characters’ flaws in any clever or meaningful way. The jokes are pure stitchwork. A collage of unrelated gags, arbitrarily placed and only occasionally funny. I feel that the humor in Men in Tights would have served better a more anthological piece like Brooks’ earlier History of the World, Part I.
Perhaps the most desperate of the jokes involves a mole on Prince John (Richard Lewis) that changes position in each of his scenes. The gag is a mild diversion that feels more like padding than anything clever.
Some of the jokes are overwrought. When we first meet Blinkin (Mark Blankfield) he is a blind man reading a medieval issue of “Ye Olde Playboy” in braille, the centerfold rendered embossed to aid his disability. There is simply too much going on here for the joke to work. A blind man reading Playboy in braille in a modern setting would have been funny. A man reading a copy of “Ye Olde Playboy” in medieval England would have been funny. A blind man reading “Ye Olde Playboy” in braille in medieval England is not funny at all.
There are comedic bits in the movie that did generate a chuckle out of me, but they suffer from the same desperate shoehorning that plagues the film. I especially appreciated a delightfully dumb bit where a formation of knights in armor are knocked over like dominoes in a highly contrived and circumstantial way that boggles respectable logic. I genuinely laughed at it. I was also tickled by a smaller scene where Blinkin somehow mistakenly thinks he can see again. It’s the sort of profound idiocy that made the Three Stooges and Beavis & Butthead so popular.
One of its best jokes involves a duel with staves between Little John (Eric Allan Kramer) and Robin Hood (Cary Elwes in a performance too imitative of Westley in the vastly superior The Princess Bride). Their incompetent attempts to adapt to the rods constantly splitting into smaller and smaller pieces is a riot and there is some mild amusement when Little John shows that he is unaware that the bridge he is guarding is over a shallow brook that a Lilliputian could cross with no effort.

But enough about the jokes. What about the story? Robin Hood is a folk hero ripe for parody. He was the subject of numerous renaissance ballads, popularized by novelists like Howard Pyle and Sir Walter Scott, and brought to life on the silver screen by the likes of Erroll Flynn and Walt Disney Studios. There is a wealth of material there to work with.
Unfortunately, Mel Brooks appears to solely target the Kevin Costner take (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves) which the gap of a few years was enough to make this spoof untimely. Had Brooks set his sights more broadly perhaps he would have had more to joke about.
The movie opens with Robin Hood in prison in Jerusalem after helping King Richard fight in the crusades. There is a quick and shoddily paced build-up to a clandestine escape and afterward his rescuer, Asneeze (Isaac Hayes) sends Robin to find his son Ahchoo (Dave Chappelle, whose comedic talent is criminally underused in the movie) who is living as an exchange student (don’t ask) from Africa to England.
This turns out to not be much of a quest because Robin Hood encounters him almost immediately when reaching England. Ahchoo becomes the first of Robin Hood’s merry men and an adventure follows where the two of them recruit more members. None of these additions are particularly funny. There is Little John as mentioned above, but there is also Will Scarlett OHara (Matthew Porretta), whose only quality is an unfunny name and an apparent skill with throwing knives that is barely used in a movie overcrowded with other underused competing characters. There is also Rabbi Tuckman (Mel Brooks) filling in for Friar Tuck (haha, I guess) and, of course, Maid Marian (Amy Yasbeck) who is presented as an easy woman frustrated by virginity, vigorously enforced by a chastity belt.
The chastity belt is the subject of an absurd prophecy that the bearer of its key will be the man who shall marry her. Vying for her affections is the unimpressive Sheriff of Rottenham (no, that’s not a typo) played by Roger Rees as a foppish and vaguely effeminate coward.
The plot continues to meander with jointless plots and counterplots supplemented by random gags and groan-inducing puns. The archery tournament, winning of Maid Marian, and ousting of Prince John come late in the final act after the movie’s pace has already been firmly eviscerated.

Perhaps I may seem too harsh on Robin Hood: Men in Tights. The movie altogether is passably entertaining and watchable and its mood is amiable enough, I suppose. There is a sense of fun to it and it is clear that no one involved in it took the source material seriously. That is acceptable after all, but I was hoping that the comedy would have been taken seriously at least. Much of the jokes fall flat and do not carry the story along an inch. The desperation and randomness of its jokes left me wishing for more. Coming from Mel Brooks, Robin Hood: Men in Tights is disappointing. It doesn’t live up to the standards of his earlier work and the dearth of clever, memorable dialogue is hard to forgive.
It’s a movie that is just okay. I’ve seen better.

Roman Holiday (1953)

4/4 stars

Audrey Hepburn was a special kind of star. Not a classy bombshell, but someone more accessible. In every Hepburn performance she is all charm and innocence; softened by pure affability. Her face and manner made men fall in love with her and women wanted to be her. She was the sort of woman where words like “sexy” or “hot” would be a pathetic waste and a clear miss of the mark. She was the sort of woman men write poems about.

Even in her bad films (like Funny Face) Audrey Hepburn is always likable and remains a highlight that elevates the piece if even by a margin. In her good films (like this one or My Fair Lady) she is a worshipful dream. She was one of the last stars to come out of the Golden Age of Hollywood; and if she is not definitively the best, she is still my personal favorite.

Director William Wyler’s (Ben-Hur) Roman Holiday may very well be the best of Hepburn’s movies; it certainly utilizes her screen persona to its fullest. She plays a bored royal named Princess Ann who, after a bad reaction to a drug meant to calm her nerves, runs away from her tight-knit existence and drunkenly wanders the streets of Rome (shot on location throughout) before meeting American journalist Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck). He doesn’t know who she is and innocently takes her to his apartment to sleep off the episode. Peck plays the complete gentleman, painfully aware of the potential for scandal; and even when she implies that less savory attention wouldn’t be unwelcome, he keeps distance out of respect for her drunken state. Peck strikes me as a sort of anti-Robert Mitchum, powerfully male, but clean cut and highly noble.
When he sees her face in the morning newspaper Bradley learns who she is and he sees an opportunity for an exclusive interview and an easy payout from his editor. This is easier said than done while Princess Ann keeps herself hard to pin down as she enjoys a new carefree freedom. Away from the pampered structured life to which she had hitherto been accustomed she soaks in Rome as a wide-eyed tourist rather than a VIP. She goes dancing, buys ice cream, gets her haircut, and gives Peck a near heart attack in the film’s most memorable scene when she wildly wrecks havoc through the Roman streets on a Vespa.
Of course, the pair eventually fall in love. The moment comes at a perfect time in which the audience has had time to fall in love with her as well. It’s clear that the few days that they spend together will remain in memory as the happiest time of their lives. When the film ends the time they had is tragically short and neither Bradley or Ann will quite replicate those feelings again. First love is like that.
At the end there is pain, but not misery. Back in her proper ceremonial place she and Peck must pretend to meet for the first time and not know each other. Their final departure is bittersweet, but there is no bitterness.

While watching Roman Holiday I was overwhelmed with a personal sense of nostalgia for the days when I was a youth and in love for the first time. Like with the characters in the film, there is a lingering ache tempered with positive experiences that will carry into the remainder of my days.
The best films leave us with real feelings. They bring out our emotions without manipulation and outrageous pathos. Romantic comedies often fail in this regard, but Roman Holiday happily does not. Even when it is being silly it recalls to mind sincere feelings of lost youth and how love at that age is an adventure, best remembered but not to be recaptured. The movie made me sad as well as happy. The mark of an excellent film is its way to evoke different feelings depending on the age of the viewer. When I was younger Roman Holiday would have been a reflective bit of charming fun. Now that I am a little older it recalls to mind feelings that are more real.

I look forward to revisiting Roman Holiday as an elderly man and see how it makes me feel then.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

4/4 stars

The Mad Max series continues to improve with each passing entry. The first film was little more than a bit of roughneck ozploitation and lacked the sense of good fun that characterized the sequels. As the films have come along director George Miller hones his skill framing sustained sequences of nonstop action and in Fury Road he has brought his craft to perfection.

Mad Max: Fury Road is essentially a two hour chase picture; simply plotted and finely choreographed. Nonstop action can be quite dull in a lot of movies, but this movie has such brilliantly tuned pacing that my investment in its story never became fatigued. It takes a fine hand to make movies like this so good and this is one of the best of its kind; proudly standing among Terminator 2 or Aliens as one of the greatest action movies ever made.

The movie sees Mad Max (played by Tom Hardy replacing Mel Gibson) run afoul of a gang of bandits who take him prisoner to their Citadel, a massive canyon fortress ruled by an asthmatic albino warlord named Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne). The ruler keeps his minions in religious awe of him and he controls access to a large reservoir of water by which he holds his subjects under his thumb. When his favored Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) defects and smuggles his harem of “breeders” out of the citadel Max is dragged along as Immortan goes after her to get them back. While on the chase Max is handcuffed to one of Immortan’s feral soldiers named Nux (Nicholas Hoult). In the ensuing battle Max escapes his captors along with Nux as an unwanted addition. He makes contact with the fleeing Furiosa and their relationship opens with mistrust and mismatched priorities, but then develops into a friendship and an enjoined quest to bring Immortan’s escaping harem to a place of safety. The girls (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoe Kravitz, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, and Courtney Eaton) are a sensual lot of macguffins whose combination of little personality and minimal attire makes them offset whatever feminist and anti-slavery themes the movie is trying to convey. There is something puerile about fantasies of “grateful” rescued women in distress that appeals to the audience, and I feel attempting to find social commentary in how these women are presented here would be dishonest. The girls are eye-candy and little else; and the “people are not property” message is best found elsewhere. If this be a serious flaw, it is a flaw that is participated in by its actresses and its being a testosterone-fueled action romp. And perhaps it can be forgiven. Fury Road makes up for it with a tight camaraderie between its three central heroes and a highly entertaining narrative that marries road pictures (an under-acknowledged genre) with riveting special effects and action. The film is more escapist than philosophical and works perfectly on that level.

The car chase which makes up the majority of the film’s runtime is a spectacle of blood, dust, chrome, booming voices, and good old-fashioned grit. Barely a scene goes by without burning rubber and blowing sand. It’s an aggressive escapade of rust, gasoline, battered metal, and roaring engines. The film is high on bravado and violent energy. It’s post-nuke desert landscape creates a visually arresting palette of reds and yellows while its kinetic pace never stoops to repetition. The use of color in Fury Road is essential to its aesthetic and I can only look at the black-and-white version that was released as a meritless gimmick that fails to understand the proper uses of black-and-white and what it is for. This movie along with Logan (another great picture bastardized with a black-and white version) was made with color in mind and is best seen that way.

Tom Hardy, in a role requiring minimal dialogue, fills Max’s shoes well enough; but he doesn’t quite have the charismatic appeal of Gibson and Miller made the right choice in making Furiosa the film’s main perspective throughout the majority of it. Hardy is left to do the physical gruntwork of the Max character without talking too much to make the recast uncomfortably stand out.
While I would have been happy to see Mel Gibson take on the role again as an older Max, Fury Road still remains, to my mind, the best of the Mad Max series. Miller tried with the first one and succeeded with the next two. With this one, he perfected.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

4/4 stars

“Rebellions are built on hope.” This is said twice in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and each time it is said it’s to galvanize the cynical to action. The phrase is not wasted on its audience nor used to preach to the choir. It’s directed at those who need it the most: the complacent and the cowardly.
Hope is not a happy subject. It is, in fact, a very sobering and serious one. There is nothing lightweight or naive about it. Hope demands a lot. It often comes attached with sacrifice and tragedy. The fact that Pandora’s Box contained hope should not be surprising to anyone who understands what hope means and what it asks of us.

Rogue One is the second Star Wars film made by Lucasfilm after Disney purchased the company and after the rather tepid and lightly-treading The Force Awakens, it was a step in the right direction. Star Wars is more than childish escapism. It’s also about something. It preaches hope without guarantees, abandoning self for larger causes, and faith while under fire. The series also has a lot to say about hatred, forgiveness, redemption, and what vengefulness does to a soul. In many ways Star Wars provides an accessible extrapolation of the Sermon on the Mount and explicable context to “blessed are the meek.”

Rogue One offers up the same message and theme as the original Star Wars movie, but on the other side of the coin. While Luke, Han, Leia, and company make it out alive, the characters in this film do not. Untouchable main characters are safe and digestible, but leave out something. The most worthwhile endeavors, Rogue One tells us, come at great cost. Like in the original Star Wars, director Gareth Edwards and the Lucasfilm Story Group manage to craft a colorful cast of mismatched and attachable characters; and in doing so they succeed in the film’s final scenes to hammer home the ultimate importance of hope, especially when it is all one has.

Career criminal Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) is picked up and recruited into the Rebellion by Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and a smart-mouthed (-vocalizered?) droid named K-2SO (Alan Tudyk). Turns out her father Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelson) is a top Imperial scientist and a lead designer on the dreaded Death Star whose construction is nearing completion. What begins as a quest to extract (i.e. secretly assassinate) Galen becomes something much bigger when it is revealed that Jyn’s father had purposely planted an exploitable flaw in the Death Star that gives a small chance for destroying it. Unfortunately Galen’s message does not elaborate on the specific nature of the flaw and a race ensues to steal the Death Star plans and deliver them to the Rebellion in order to discover the station’s weakness. Standing in their way are the entirety of the Imperial military and the machinations of Grand Moff Tarkin (impressively recreated by CGI mo-cap) and the ambitious and overcompensating Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn). Along the way our heroes pick up a variety of interesting characters: the blind Force-sensitive monk Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen), his more grounded and cynical protector Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen), and an imperial defector named Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed).

The characters in Rogue One stand apart from the heroes of the Original Star Wars Trilogy in their lack of perfection and their worldly disregard for moral idealism. Jyn sees the Empire as an unstoppable reality and prefers to keep herself uninvolved with her head down. Cassian makes ethically compromised decisions for what he believes is the greater good. “We’ve all done terrible things on behalf of the Rebellion” he says early in the movie. It is not until Jyn’s father is killed in a botched operation does he begin to see the bigger picture of what it means to be one of the good guys and what is and what is not acceptable for a good man to do no matter what.

What makes Rogue One among the best Star Wars films is its uncynical honesty (a sadly rare combination in film and literature in this day of anti-heroes and angry young men). A lot of snake oil preachers give us an unrealistic view of the world when teaching moral values. They deny the ugliness of the world because it is too hard for them to reconcile their teachings with it. Rogue One denies nothing and tells us to be good anyway. The characters operate on a lot of ifs and long shots. There is no guarantee that they will succeed in getting the Death Star plans or survive the attempt and more difficult still is there is no guarantee that the plans will contain anything useful. And later on as we have seen there is no guarantee that the Rebellion will succeed in destroying the Death Star even if a weakness is found. A lot of people die for these uncertainties. The guarantees are absent. Only hope remains. But rebellions, after all, are built on hope.

Balanced with Rogue One’s themes is a wildly entertaining adventure. The special effects on display are some of Star Wars’s best and the action sequences are well-sustained and paced with plenty of emotional investment to keep the viewer enthralled. The final scenes are full of tragedy and show the grim reality of sacrifice amidst unwelcoming odds. But tragedy is neither the final note nor word of the film. It is hope.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

3/4 stars

When Max (Mel Gibson) enters the Thunderdome he is introduced to the roaring crowd as “the man with no name.”
It suits.
Like the seminal Man with No Name trilogy that made Clint Eastwood famous the Mad Max series presents a singular hero against a singular backdrop without the need for any ongoing continuity. Their adventures can be viewed in any order with no appreciable loss of comprehension. Like tall tales of gods and folk heroes told around a fire, which story is chosen on any given day does not matter a great deal. By being introduced in this way what director George Miller is trying to tell the audience is that Australia now has its own modern day Eastwood.

A more striking allusion in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is made to Peter Pan and his Lost Boys of Neverland. In the film Max encounters a group of feral children who yearn for unclear memories of the past before the apocalyptic wastelands became their home. And like Wendy Darling in Peter Pan, Max must face off against the children’s naivete, delusions, and mistrust before leading them in a fight for freedom against some roguish grownups.

The movie begins with Max coming to a thuggish frontier city called Bartertown where resides the titular Thunderdome, a crude gladiator arena which sits in the center of town. What he finds there is an ongoing power struggle between a charismatic dominatrix named Auntie Entity (played by Tina Turner) and Master Blaster, an odd couple consisting of a child-minded brute (Blaster) and the brains of their unit (Master) who is a dwarf that rides Blaster’s back.
A deal is struck between Auntie and Max that in exchange for resources he must fight and kill Blaster in the Thunderdome. He agrees and what follows is one of the more memorable action set pieces of the film.
The Thunderdome is taller than it is wide and its combatants are attached to suspending harnesses that allow them to bounce around the arena grabbing a variety of weapons attached to the dome. The environment is not flashy, but the fight is exciting.
When Max discovers that Blaster has the mind of a child he refuses to kill him and reveals the deal to Master. Enraged, Auntie has Max sent out into the desert to die. There he is rescued by a clan of young children who mistake him for a legendary captain who featured heavily into their myths. He denies the messianic role and at first wants little to do with the group. But soon he takes on a protective paternal role and leads them to the film’s climax in a faceoff against Auntie Entity and the villains of Bartertown.

Sadly the relationship between Max and the kids makes for one of the weakest points of the film and lacks proper development. Much is rushed and I wanted to see more. Some more time getting acquainted with the group and scenes of Max preparing them for the battle ahead would have gone a long way and the absence of such scenes robbed me of emotional investment. I would have preferred the Lost Boys motif better explored, but pacing and marketable film length are often at odds when crafting an action picture and the movie suffers from prioritizing its action scenes.
The action scenes, however, are quite good if not quite up to the standards of Mad Max 2. The previous film featured a sustained chase scene in the desert that is replicated here, but not as effectively. I felt that I had seen much of this before in the last film; Tina Turner’s gravitas and the good-natured fun of the whole thing being the chief highlight of the final sequence.

I genuinely liked Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome, but I wanted more of it.

The Snow Queen (1957)

4/4 stars

There is an unspoken rule in the film industry that all children’s animated movies must be comedies. Disney follows this rule to the letter. Even when they are brave enough to trust children to accept a serious treatment of serious subjects, comedy is never too far away to provide a kind of cushioning pathos that I do not believe children truly need. At least certainly not to the degree that all children’s movies must be comedies. Lev Atamanov, the director of the highly evocative The Snow Queen, understands this perfectly. Children or not, he respects his audience.

The Snow Queen is in many ways a highly derivative work, owing much of its presentation and style to Disney’s Snow White, Pinocchio. and even Bambi. There is also nothing particularly transformative about its adaptation of the original Hans Christian Andersen story.
But, what elevates it to a masterpiece is its mood and its haunting imagery. Fairy story is at its best and its most pure when it is distant. Western animation (especially the modern variety) is generally garish and tends to over-explain. It often lacks that distance which is key to a love and appreciation of Fairy-Land. Without distance there is no magic and The Snow Queen glows with magic and takes it seriously.

The story begins with two young lovers named Gerda and Kai. When they first hear tales of the Snow Queen from Gerda’s grandmother Kai causes offence by suggesting that he would stuff her in the oven and melt her should she ever stop by. In response the Snow Queen sends a blast of ice to freeze his heart and he transforms from tender-hearted child to a cruel loveless miscreant. The Queen herself is made entirely of ice and dwells in a frozen castle that instantly calls to mind the White Witch and her keep in the Narnian stories. She, too, like the White Witch, drives a sleigh and whisks the boy Kai away in it. He goes willingly since his spirit has now gone cold. There, at her castle, Kai slowly forgets Gerda and all that he once valued which the Queen denies ever having existed. She tells him that poetry, artists, and feelings are not real; and even life itself appears to be denied when she claims flowers are inferior to ice crystals because they are not cold and stagnant like herself.

Gerda, who remains pure and innocent, journeys to find and rescue Kai and along the way meets talking ravens, lonesome witches, princes and princesses, and even roving bands of woodland robbers. In none of these adventures does Gerda meet much resistance and she moves on from each with a minimum of fuss. At 65 minutes in length the film cannot take more than a passing glance at its episodes, but manages to keep a gentle non-breakneck pace throughout. When she finally makes her way to Kai and the Snow Queen’s castle the resolution is swift, but natural and fitting.

More gratifying than the film’s story is its animation. While it is clearly influenced by Disney, it’s less gaudy and kinetic; maintaining a quiet holiday postcard quality and an atmosphere of distance between the audience and the ethereal fairyland that is its subject. The Snow Queen’s icy castle is isolated and apart from all other realities; appearing to Gerda magically rather than truly being got to. The Queen is of towering size and dwarfs Kai when sitting upon her throne. She is animated through the same old rotoscoping techniques seen in Disney’s Snow White, but much more effectively here. She is often shown completely still and statuesque, like a marble goddess of classical antiquity. She is more spooky than frightening, more awe-inspiring than beautiful.
The movie presents us with a fairy-land not rich and complicated, but dreamlike and perilous. The paths to the Snow Queen’s castle are cold, windswept, and hidden by winter’s night. And therein things can only fade, but never die for they are eternal.

The quality of distance that I had mentioned earlier is important to the fairy story because fairy tales are not meant to show us things that are new. They are not meant to awaken our consciousness to deep philosophical thoughts. Fairy stories don’t take us someplace else. They take us home. Our souls yearn and long for things that cannot be described prosaically, and fairy-land is where a taste of those longings is found. The Snow Queen succeeds as a fairy tale where many Disney films do not because it is evocative and not flashy; haunting without being brazen; and good-humored without being crass.

The Snow Queen is a Soviet film that we in the States could just have easily have missed for no other reason than petty politics which is often where art finds its death. In the late 1950’s cultural exchanges between America and Russia were largely unheard of thanks to the Cold War. This film was one of the first to cross the divide and we are richer for it. There are profound beauties in this world that we let barriers of language and identity keep us from discovering. The Snow Queen is proof of it.

Foreign Correspondent (1940)

Rating 4/4

Foreign Correspondent was an extremely timely film. Released on August 16, 1940, Alfred Hitchcock’s film predicted the German aerial raids of London three days before they happened. When it was released in the UK they had already had.

The film had its beginning as a loose adaptation of journalist Vincent Sheean’s memoirs, but became something much more. After nearly five years of development by producer Walter Wanger and tons of rewrites the project was finally handed over to Hitchcock.

Johnny Jones (Joel McCrea) is a New York crime reporter who is assigned duties as a foreign correspondent to London. He’s to report on the conditions of Europe that will eventually lead up to World War II. His boss, Mr. Powers (Harry Davenport) is disillusioned with the correspondents previously sent over and he figures that perhaps sending a crime reporter would be best. War after all is the worst sort of organized crime. Like mafia men ordering a hit, war is often arranged by cleancut men in suits cheerfully distant from the misery and the mess they create. Much of these sort of men – become old and cynical – show a remarkable ambivalence toward war throughout the film.

His assignment is to interview a Dutch diplomat named Van Meer (Albert Basserman) who is to speak at a luncheon hosted by a Universal Peace Party. The party’s leader is one Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall) who has treasonous and very unpeacelike motivations of his own.
After Van Meer is seemingly assassinated Jones soon discovers that the diplomat had been kidnapped in secret by Fisher’s men and the assassination target was a decoy. Van Meer is one of only a few men alive who knows the truth about a secret clause in a treaty that would benefit the Nazi regime should it end up in their hands. The clause is never explicitly revealed in the film because it is not important. It is a macguffin. What is important is that Van Meer is rescued safe and sound at all costs.

Involved in the mess is Mr. Fisher’s daughter Carol (Laraine Day) who has fallen in love with Johnny and agrees to marry him. The complications that arise when she discovers her father is a traitor are obvious.

Before its climax Foreign Correspondent moves along with the same mastery of suspense that would color Hitchcock’s later films in Hollywood. One of its most famous scenes is when Johnny gets his coat caught in the gears of an old windmill and struggles to take it off before the machinery kills him. And in, what I believe, is an even more effective moment of suspense is when Carol unwittingly upsets Johnny and another agent’s plans. Johnny takes her on a trip while his colleague Scott ffolliott (George Sanders) tells Mr. Fisher she had been abducted and he needs to disclose the location of Van Meer to get her back. Carol who had not been made aware of the plan comes home early while ffolliot (the F’s are intentionally lower case) is still there threatening her father. Everything had been going so well up until then and the tension created is immediate. It left me hooked to see the outcome.

Foreign Correspondent ends with Johnny reporting over the radio that the Germans had begun bombing London. The lights and power go out, the explosions can be heard outside shaking the studio; but he goes on for the American listeners to hear. The scene was written by screenwriter Ben Hecht and it was added during post-production when all the other footage had been completed. Reports that the Germans would be bombing London soon convinced the filmmakers to replace the film’s original ending with this one.

The extreme timeliness of Foreign Correspondent’s ending made the film more than just one of the greatest political thrillers of all time. It also crafted an extremely well made and effective propaganda piece for both British and American audiences alike. Even the Nazis’ own chief of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, recognized it as such calling the movie “a masterpiece of propaganda, a first-class production which no doubt will make a certain impression upon the broad masses of the people in enemy countries.” Goebbels is now deservedly dead and so is his Third Reich. As a classic this movie and the nations that created it outlasted him so I suppose he must have been right.

The movie is also technically ahead of its time with an extremely riveting sequence depicting a plane crash. Using actual footage of a plane descending toward water, Hitchcock had it rear projected onto a screen made of rice paper with large water tanks behind it. With a push of a button the water crashes through the screen filling the cockpit set. Highly convincing and innovative for 1940. It was a technical achievement that Hitchcock remained very proud of for the rest of his life.
He was less proud of the casting, wanting Gary Cooper and Joan Fontaine for the main roles of Johnny and Carol. Producer David O. Selznick refused to loan Fontaine out and he had to settle with Laraine Day who is passable in the role.
Gary Cooper turned down the part of Johnny, but he came to regret it and later admitted he made a mistake. I am not sure he had. I really enjoy Joel McCrea’s performance in this as the good-natured and amiably sardonic Mr. Jones. Cooper is a great actor, but this role wasn’t for him.