Star Wars: The Force Awakens hits nearly all the right notes with breezy, rich flair — a film review
December 16, 2015
Two years ago, I wrote about the expectations I had for J.J. Abrams taking the helm of the new Star Wars movie (Film Review: ‘Star Trek: Into Darkness’ proves J.J. Abrams a better director than George Lucas). With a little weird sense of doubt, I think he has delivered.
Regardless of what is written here, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is going to break all the records that pundits have been predicting. There are too many generations of Star Wars fans waiting for this movie to come out already. This writer is of the first generation. As such, the experience of watching the movie yesterday afternoon was something akin to religious. This is where it becomes difficult to separate the film critic from the man who still remembers seeing the original TV commercial for Star Wars and wanting my father to take me to see this movie, not to mention the actual theatrical experience, the behind-the-scenes specials on TV and yes, even the Holiday Special.
I took it all in with nothing but awe, all the way to Return of the Jedi and its finale featuring singing ewoks. That said, I never liked any of prequels, which felt like nothing more than digital cartoons serving to explicate too much of the Star Wars universe. Lucas had lost touch, and the need for new blood was ripe. As a fan of what he did with Star Trek and Super 8, I could see why Abrams would feel like the perfect fit by the film’s producers. And his ethos does work … for the most part.
There’s no reason to spoil the plot of The Force Awakens, but as a new beginning for the franchise it balances old and new brilliantly. The story, written by Abrams, Lawrence Kasdan (who also co-wrote the scripts of Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi) and Michael Arndt, features some smart self-referential moments with refreshing efforts to ground the characters deeper than ever into this faraway galaxy, from a long time ago, without forgetting a delightful dollop of humor. The action, backed by that familiar John Williams score, will amaze, but it’s also thankfully not as breathless as the Star Trek movies. There’s an awareness to the original tempo of the earlier Star Wars films. So though there are plenty of intense battle scenes, dogfights between spaceships and several one-on-one confrontations, there are also quieter moments thick with character development that never slow down the movie’s momentum.
Though it is great seeing old characters like Han Solo (Harrison Ford), Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) return to the Star Wars universe, it’s a relief to note how exciting and vibrant the new young leads are, which bodes well for the continuation of this saga. Adam Driver has an immense presence as the villain Kylo Ren. Even behind the battered mask he exudes a malevolent pathos of an upstart tangling with the 
shadow within that is the dark side of the Force. The highlight of the young additions, however, has to be the fun, flirtatious and sometimes tender chemistry between Finn (John Boyega) and Rey (Daisy Ridley). Our new heroes captivate throughout the film and really give The Force Awakens its heart and soul. The biggest surprise in the character development arena, however, comes in the filmmakers’ humanizing of the Stormtroopers (just watch for the small moments featuring everything from humor to menace, plus it’s kind of refreshing to hear female voices coming out through those helmets).
Despite all this praise and so much more hyperbole you are bound to hear from others, I could not help but feel a bit of trepidation about some decisions in the filmmaking that only slightly drained some of the magic from the movie. As great as it might seem for the writers to find the right places for lines like “I got a bad feeling about this,” it gets a bit trite. One would hope that these films will rise above their own tropes and not turn into a lumbering ball of self-referencing with little substance like the James
Bond series. Then there are two mechanical problems in the script that stood out as rather weak when they shouldn’t have been. As it’s not fair to spoil these plot points this late in the film’s non-release, all I will say is that it involves a bit of precious and heavy-handed exposition involving a long-winded private moment between Han and Leia (they deserve better), and another scene involving one of these key figures that many might see coming. It’s a moment that’s a bit too eerily reflective of another scene at the start of the first trilogy of these movies. Though the scene is supposed to be a climactic moment, it feels eerily hollow in its inevitability, like a loose end that long needed patching up.
In the end, does it deserve all this talk about awards? Though there are solar systems at stake, the urgency still doesn’t match that of Mad Max: Fury Road (Overturning Patriarchy in the Post-apocalyptic World:Mad Max: Fury Road – A Film Review) or even Spotlight. As they finally get their chance to mess around in this world, you never get the sense that Abrams and co. are trying to do anything more than make Star Wars fun again, and there are indeed plenty of occasions to make it fun, from crafty new uses of lightsabers to more tie fighters going through the ringer than I would have ever expected to see in one Star Wars movie. Thus, The Force Awakens does deserve its own hype as a Star Wars film. The cynic in me would say, please, let the hype stop at that, but there’s no denying this strange sense of reconnecting with my childhood and watching the sequel that I had always yearned to see for more than 30 years. That it does live up to that hype should be reason alone to say this is the film that indeed I had been waiting for.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens runs 135 minutes and is rated PG-13. It opens pretty much everywhere on Thursday night with options to see it in 2-D, 3-D and IMAX. Disney Studios invited me to a 2-D preview screening for the purpose of this review. All images in this review are courtesy of www.starwars.com.
Film Review: ‘Jodorowsky’s Dune’ celebrates the creativity necessary to do justice in sci-fi cinema
April 23, 2014
To many, the new documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune will feel like a nice consolation for the fact that cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky never finished his version of Frank Herbert’s esteemed sci-fi epic. It’s a terrific chronicle of the Chilean director’s ambitious planning to prepare a thorough treatment for his first film proposed to major Hollywood studios. But it is also a celebration of unfettered creativity in all its glorious excess.
For Jodorowsky, a film about several worlds fighting for possession of a substance that expands consciousness should be treated literally as a mind-altering experience. When he set out to adapt the beloved book (which he admits he never read) in 1975, he said he wanted to not just make a film but “a prophet.” He wanted to alter viewers’ sense of perception. He says he wanted to create the cinematic sensation of taking LSD.
What resulted was several hard-bound books of spaceship designs, character sketches, costumes and storyboards that detailed his vision … but no film. In this documentary, filmmaker Frank Pavich interviews Jodorowsky who waffles between the bright side of bringing a new vision to Hollywood that predated Star Wars and a suppressed rage at the machine that stifled his vision. 
Pavich also brings to life the images of the book by editing together the story boards and animating some of the many detailed concept designs of the spaceships by rendering them digitally. The camera pans and scales over the static images from the book. There are sound effects and an eerie, Moog-drenched score by Kurt Stenzel that could have been the score to Jodorowky’s Dune. It’s as close to the would-be movie as we get.
But that’s not the point of this documentary.
Jodorowsky’s Dune is really about the vision of the cult director that ultimately expands the consciousness of Hollywood for the daring vision needed to pull off science fiction with respect to considering possibilities that go beyond earthbound thinking. 
Directors like George Lucas, Ridley Scott and James Cameron are indeed indebted to Jodorowsky for planting the seed of possibility for latter-day sci-fi work such as their’s.
Jodorowsky gathered a true dream team of collaborators, or, as he calls them, warriors, to make his film. He hired people like H.R. Giger, who would later design the title monster of the Alien movies, to design the world of the evil Harkonnen. The dark prog rock band Magma was to compose all the music associated with it. Meanwhile, Pink Floyd agreed to also provide original music and Chris Foss and Jean “Moebius” Giraud were brought in for design and artwork. Dan O’Bannon who would go on to write the screenplay for Alien was hired as a screenwriter based on what Jodorowsky saw in Dark Star. Clearly inspired about by Kurick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jodorowsky also pursued that film’s Oscar-winning effects man Douglas Trumbull. However, Jodorowsky was turned off by his underwhelming, practical bottom-line attitude. He was no spiritual warrior for Dune.
The beauty of this documentary comes from its ability to channel Jodorowsky’s lively attitude for art as enlightenment and spiritual home. When he says he does not want to compromise to the studios even if it means the demise of his project, it becomes the right thing. It’s as if Jodorowsky’s Dune fell apart as a martyr so it might inspire films like Star Wars and Alien.
As ever with Jodorowsky, there’s humor in his wisdom. When Star Wars fans bemoaned George Lucas’ revising 
his films with digital effects in the 1990s the mantra became “George Lucas raped my childhood.” Jodorowsky, however, proudly declares, “I raped Frank Herbert,” as he thrusts his hips back and forth holding an imaginary book doggy style in front of him. In that charming Jodorowsky way of his, he is not belittling the source material. Instead, he compares it to the consummation of marriage, taking a virginal bride dressed in white to the bedroom, tearing away her dress and fucking her. “I raped him with love,” he adds.
It doesn’t matter that Jodorowsky never read the book. What matters is that he created his own work, something that has only gained more value over time. The legend grows as with its mystical possibilities, hence the notion that this may indeed be one of the greatest films never made. Director Nicolas Winding Refn appears early in the documentary to boast that he’s the only one who has seen Jodorowsky’s version of Dune because the director himself sat with him and paged through the book and shared his vision. As we can expect with Refn, it’s a rather juvenile and insulting comment to this idea of possibilities of what the essence of this film did for science fiction cinema. It lowers the film to a materialistic level that defies Jodorowsky’s vision, which belongs to the imagination, and that’s why Jodorowsky’s Dune stands as the greatest sci-fi movie never made.
Jodorowsky’s Dune runs 90 minutes and is rated PG-13 (for fantastical violent and sexual images and drug references). It opens in South Florida on Apr. 25 in Miami Beach at the Regal South Beach and in Boca Raton at Living Room Theaters and Regal Shadowood. The following week, it opens in Miami at O Cinema Wynwood. It will appear at the Miami Beach Cinematheque on June 7 with other Jodorowsky surprises to be announced. Sony Pictures Classics invited me to a preview screening for the purpose of this review.
Update: Actor Brontis Jodorowsky will present the film in person on June 15; he will also introduce another film he stars in, Táu (see MBC’s calendar for details). On Tuesday, June 17, at 7 p.m., he, Village Voice film critic Michael Atkinson and Miami Herald film critic Rene Rodriguez will share the stage at MBC in the second installment of the Knight Foundation-sponsored series “Speaking In Cinema” to discuss this film and other works by Jodorowsky (see details). A meet-and-greet party at the Sagamore Hotel ends the night.
Earlier Update: Cinema Paradiso has booked Jodorowsky’s Dune to begin its run Friday, May 23, at both its Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood locations (jump through the city names for dates and times).
Film Review: ‘Star Trek: Into Darkness’ proves J.J. Abrams a better director than George Lucas
May 16, 2013
Lens flares, zooms, explosions, 3-D, space ships, aliens! Ugh, that was exhausting. Still, I cannot knock Star Trek Into Darkness. It takes a crafty, passionate hand to do a film like this right. Often science fiction action films stumble over the edge into camp or tread lightly in two safe zones: talking down to children or challenging the adult intellect. The Star Trek franchise has long suffered all of these states except for a handful of transcendent moments on television or in the movies. Director J.J. Abrams, however. seems to have the ideal formula locked down.
A fourth theatrical film into his career, and there’s no doubt Abrams has an innate talent for the science fiction action genre. Super 8 was the fifth greatest film I saw in 2011 (An antidote for Oscar hype: My 20 favorite films of 2011 [numbers 10 – 1]). Before that, I appreciated his previous Star Trek film enough to purchase the Blu-ray, and I only buy about three to four new releases for my library per year. I have not seen Mission Impossible III, but I may correct that. But, most importantly, three sci-fi action films in, and I have no trouble calling him a better director than George Lucas. The more I learn about what happened behind the scenes of Star Wars: A New Hope, the more I feel its success came from serendipitous good fortune for Lucas. However, Abrams is the super-evolved spawn who grew up with Star Wars through the rose-colored glasses of 1970s youth. It seeped into his consciousness as a consumer, and he idealized it in a manner as most adults beguiled with nostalgic memories of the film’s release in 1977. The trick is he turned his passion into a talent for writing efficient scripts and later directing similar films. That’s what makes him the ideal choice to direct the seventh Star Wars movie.
Abrams’ talent unfurls in full blossom on the 3-D screen with Star Trek Into Darkness. His signature use of blue lens flares cut bright highlights into many shots. As much as he loves setting technology in motion, he also relishes in the way characters and nature react to it, adding a heft and presence beyond gravity. From puffs of steam from a levitating freight vehicle barreling down an invisible aerial road to the spaceship Enterprise wobbling through hyperspace, all these animated props are granted a deeper dimension. Abrams loves the zoom effect. From a classic use jolting the audience’s eyes to a closer look at a distant skirmish to melding wide exterior shots of floating spaceships to intimate close-ups of its crew, he keeps it feeling fresh and engaging.
The symphony of sonic overload during the violent scenes perpetrated by a mysterious character (A brooding and blistering performance by Benedict Cumberbatch) 
who comes out of nowhere to disrupt the peaceful mission of exploration by Starfleet is presented with balance against the mere mortals struggling with the ethics of deep space exploration and their own human (and sometimes alien) foibles. Abrams even indulges in some quiet moments. He set up one particularly frightful scene of violence by first presenting a couple fretting over a sickly daughter using barely a word of dialogue.
The actors dive full force into their characters, and no one over stays their welcome on the screen. One could say the film heightens their distinctions, from Dr. Leonard McCoy’s (Karl Urban) sardonic skepticism to Chekov’s (Anton Yelchin) humble desire to live up to a new task after Scotty (Simon Pegg) butts heads with the captain over the subtleties of the engine room on the Enterprise. The same can be said of the leads, Captain Kirk (Chris Pine playing cocky with ebullient charm) and Mr. Spock (Zachary Quinto delighting in Spock’s limited range of stoic and befuddled). 
It’s also a delight to have Uhura (an assuredly poised Zoe Saldana) raised to a high level of relevance from the original TV show to Spock’s love interest, as established in the previous film. To top it off, the passage of time since the last film reveals a witty layer of friction threatening the bond of Uhura and Spock in a manner that should distinguish a love affair between a human and a half human/half Vulcan. But the most fascinating actor to watch is Cumberbatch. As the slippery central nemesis of the film, he plays a sort of creature confident in his position above the beings around him. His presence in various scenarios takes the challenge of this character to all sorts of interesting levels, as one amusing kink in the plot piles on top of the other.
If there are any gripes about Star Trek Into Darkness, they are nitpicky ones. Maybe a syrupy exchange between a couple of characters in a life-and-death situation could have been cut with a few more drops of vinegar. The sexism heaped upon the women may be innate in the “Star Trek” world of the original television series from the ‘60s, but Abrams’ early work as creator of both the “Felicity” (with Matt Reeves) and “Alias” television serials proves he can do women fairer justice. But everything else works so clean and clear in Star Trek Into Darkness, these complaints only take up a few seconds of the film’s run time and hardly resonate through the rest of the movie.
With this brilliant Star Trek sequel, Abrams proves he knows how to create an atmosphere that engages movie audiences instead of pandering to them. As Star Trek Into Darkness breezes along the director always maintains an element of surprise and mystery to keep the drama moving forward. 
He peppers in moments of wit throughout featuring dialog provided by a team of three capable writers (Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof) whose combined sci-fi/action credits speak for themselves. Yet Abrams never indulges in the script for exposition. Instead, he uses it as part of a mood that serves the roller-coaster experience of the film. He knows there’s no room in sci-fi action for indulgent introspection. Sure Tarkovsky does fabulous intellectual sci-fi but leave that to him if you are not going to go dive into that sort of movie whole-hog. Though this reboot of the Star Trek movie franchise is slated to carry on with Abrams in a producer role, what he has proven exciting about his work with stale sci-fi franchises is that he can breathe vibrant life back into them. It bodes well for the upcoming series of Star Wars movies.
Star Trek Into Darkness is rated PG-13 and runs 132 (breezy) minutes. You can catch it at any multi-plex right now, including 2-D, 3-D and IMAX. Paramount pictures invited me to a 3-D screening Wednesday night for the purpose of this review.
The documentary Side By Side is a film for the cinephiles still trying to come to terms with the end of film cameras and the rise of digital cameras. Maybe 10 years ago the debate would have been more heated, but nowadays it is about coming to terms with the new format. A couple of years ago, I posted about how film lovers simply need to accept this new medium, as everyone from studios to projectionists to general audiences were moving to the new format with little sentimentality for the past (To accept the death of celluloid).
Co-produced and hosted by Keanu Reeves, Side By Side features the actor interviewing some of cinema’s great artists. From cinematographers to editors to colorists, he sits down with them all. These people provide a wide-ranging survey of not only how they make movies but also how the conversion from 35mm to digital has affected their craft. On top of that, everyone seems to have different feelings on the new technology.
Many have knocked Reeves for years as an actor of limited range, but he, with the help of director Christopher Kenneally, offers a nerd-worthy examination at all the moving parts in making a movie while diving into the state of flux in the industry. 
You cannot help but love him for his affection for the art, which translates to a thorough, easy-to-understand and entertaining documentary on filmmaking with relevance to the moment. No matter that Reeves injects himself in the dialogue; he does not put himself onscreen to upstage the medium itself. He feels cozy to watch as he chats with all these people who have their hands in the details of the medium. With his unkempt beard and his casual dress, Reeves is no movie star, but your disheveled professor, taking you on a tour of filmmaking 101. He introduces the various roles of the people behind the scenes whose names many audience members never seem to notice as they walk out of a movie’s closing credits. In the meantime, he reveals how digital technology has affected all departments from the creative side to the distribution and projection side.
Like any good documentary on cinema, Side By Side, opens with a celebration of iconic films once exclusively distributed in the photochemical film process most filmgoers over the age 20 used to only experience in theaters. It appeals to the nostalgic, sentimental and emotional connection most film lovers have with movies. There are still some youngish film directors who staunchly support 35mm film, though it seems to have become an uphill battle. Director Christopher Nolan says early on, “I’m constantly justifying why I want to shoot a film on film, but I don’t hear anyone asked to justify why they want to shoot a film digitally.” At the age of 42, he may be part of the last generation to care about 35mm.
When I started this blog I thought celebrating film shot and distributed in 35mm and music released on vinyl were the best ways to fully appreciate these arts. Music continues to exist in vinyl fine and dandy, but film is a whole other beast, as digital technology only continues to advance. The costs of making a vinyl record do not compare to producing a 35mm movie. As someone who has both carried vinyl records and canisters of 35mm film, I know. “Film is a 19th century invention,” says Star Wars director George Lucas. “We are at the top of the photochemical process. This is as far as it’s ever gonna go.”
While explaining the change over to digital, Side By Side also provides a lesson in the movie camera and establishes just how important the cinematographer, or DP (director of photography), is to the process. Not only do some of the cinematographers interviewed celebrate 35mm film’s natural grain, they also appreciate the natural breaks in action every 10 minutes in order to change the cartridges of film that attach to the camera. Some believe these breaks allow moments of essential reflection to assess work flow. Side By Side also reveals film’s cumbersome nature encourages reflection for film editors as well, as they must handle the physical reels of footage and tape them together in the editing room. Some editors celebrate the sound of such a craft, lamenting the loss of the whir of film to clicks on a keyboard. “It’s a different way of thinking,” says Lawrence of Arabia’s editor, Ann V. Coates.
That is the other level many of those working with the film medium appreciate the format for. As a writer who used to produce first drafts longhand and revised in notebooks before typing a final product out to a professor or editor, I understand how the process in which one creates often contributes to that product’s character. I would go through at least three drafts in my old process. There is something to be said about pausing one’s work that allows to activate moments of reflection by the creative mind. Martin Scorsese 
laments that something is lost when digital allows you to playback “dailies” right after shooting a scene. With 35mm, filmmakers must wait a day to see what the film captured. Undeveloped film has to be sent to a lab where it is processed and printed. It is then sent back to a screening room the next day. Hence the name dailies. Scorsese believes dailies need to be seen later, so one can concentrate better on shooting a movie while on the set.
As Side By Side continues to chronicle the changes to cameras, including one that produced a “negative” in a cartridge, filmmakers started to evolve with the new cameras. One thing that helped were technological advances in resolution. The better the picture got, the less complaints from filmmakers. The technology began to speak for itself.
Directors were also excited about new advantages like lightweight cameras that allowed for placement and maneuverability unimaginable until now. There was also a healthy sense of competition among camera makers that pushed the quick development of the technology, from functional design to resolution. By the time Danny Boyle won his Best Picture Oscar® and— even more shocking— an Oscar® for cinematography for Slumdog Millionaire, a film mostly shot in with digital cameras, the argument had become moot. Digital had arrived, accepted as one of the tools of the trade.
Side By Side does not hold back on how thoroughly it covers the evolution of digital, as 35mm is almost consistently proven as outmoded. It even goes into the hype of the supposed next generation of theatrical digital projection: 3D. James Cameron talks of his anticipation to shoot in 3D as early as 1999 with digital technology. His Avatar certainly revealed the money studios could make with 3D. Cameron seems proud of himself, noting the successes that followed
Avatar, including Tim Burton’s shallow and garish Alice in Wonderland, which nonetheless brought in a record haul at the box office. But director Joel Schumacher warns of abusing the technology, as, he says, there are films made for that technology, like Avatar, and films that are not.
Digital technology and digital effects have grown together, the documentary notes. However, when Scorsese says, “I don’t know if our younger generation is believing anything anymore as real,” and Cameron retorts, “When was it ever real?” in separate interviews, I will hand that round to Scorsese. Even though Scorsese famously followed Cameron into digital effects and 3D with his most recent film, Hugo, which ingeniously paid tribute to cinema’s origins while embracing technological advances, I believe Scorsese is right. The weight, shadow and light interplay on digital characters still have not achieved the same level concreteness as the cheapest, rubbery creature of the B-movies. There is an artificial, almost gimmicky quality of live action characters mixed with what I consider fancy cartoons. This mix of digital and flesh and blood lightens the stakes compared to pure live action, as it calls attention to itself, disturbing the illusion of suspension of disbelief. Side By Side gives Cameron the last word, but for all he created with computers with Avatar, I do not believe he wins his argument.
In the end, Side By Side tries to hand it to celluloid in a token moment, noting it works better for archival purposes. 
Digital has a tendency to disappear off hard drives, and, with formats constantly moving forward, various methods of archiving also become outdated, leaving files irretrievable. Celluloid actually lasts longer, adds Scorsese. Though most everything seems to point to the advantage of advances in digital filmmaking, this seems to raise some bigger questions, as the documentary ends on a philosophical note tangled in the practicality of archiving. What does saving a film mean, anyway? What ultimately matters to anyone in the future will be saved somehow and even “dug up” when it matters. Ultimately, filmmakers are storytellers, and the value of the story will carry on. It doesn’t matter what sort of medium you use to tell it, be it music, books, film or some new medium that has yet to be perceived.
Trailer:
Side By Side is not rated (contains no offense material, though) and runs 99 min. It premieres exclusively in South Florida this Friday, Sept. 22 at the Miami Beach Cinematheque. Tribeca Film provided a DVD screener for the purposes of this review. It could already be playing in your city or coming soon. Jump through this link for more locations.
Independent Ethos 