One could argue, looking at the themes and box office performance of this year’s would-be summer blockbusters that actually we are in the “summer of our discontent.” Of course, I’m intentionally missing the point of this famous speech which observes that, in peace, those who’ve found power in the chaos of war long to return to those ugly moments that made them successful. Or maybe I’m not missing the point after all.
Much like The Flash (and as I understand a number of other big box office swings this summer), Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is not simply a nostalgic cash grab, but a film focused on the corrosive nature of time and of nostalgia itself. Blessedly, there are no “multiverses” to be navigated here, but we do see time travel used as a metaphor, a rather effective one, for the regrettable state of our present world. Central to the conceit of the film: how some seek the golden glow of remembered peace and adventure as a balm; how others seek a return to darker, even more chaotic moments as their salve for the inexorable passage of time; and how some (Indy) try to deny any of it ever happened at all.
As directed by James Mangold (who swam in similar “past is prologue” waters withLogan), Dial of Destiny is a loving, if overlong, capstone on the storied careers of both Indiana Jones and Harrison Ford. It’s quite impossible at this point to separate the two. Yes, Ford has crafted similarly iconic hero figures in other silver screen franchises, but Indy (at least to this lay-viewer) has always dovetailed spectacularly with Ford’s apparent “curmudgeon with a heart of gold” real life persona.
The film would have benefited from about 2.5 fewer car/horse/boat/motorcycle/train chases. It’s a lot. And for a film ostensibly about the emotional collateral damage of a long life (mostly) well lived, it’s a bit hard to accept so much wanton destruction of personal property and commuters’ sojourns for sheer entertainment value.
Much like The Flash, the film truly shines in its quieter character-driven moments. Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge (making quite a name for herself in the action genre) is a welcome addition. Her winsome brand of cynical, pleading snark as Indy’s ne’er-do-well goddaughter is a nice juxtaposition to Ford’s rock-ribbed “not this again” comic exasperation. They play very well off one another, although a few too many lines get lost in, yes, all the car/horse/boat/motorcycle/train chases.
Mads Mikkelsen adds another notch on his (shiny black leather) belt of playing icy Teutonic baddies. This time a full-on Nazi. (I do hope America remembers we don’t like Nazis.) Mikkelsen plays all the grace notes of sly sociopolitical critique in the early moments of the film when he “seems” to be a reformed Nazi helping America win its much-vaunted space race. (The film is set in 1969.) Given that such things actually did (and do) happen in America, it’s a pointedly clever reminder that the great U.S. of A. is not above reproach in its opportunism and global empire building.
We quickly find out he ain’t reformed. They never are. (Remember that, America, at the voting booth, mmkay?) His hope is to find two parts of an ancient dial, crafted by ancient mathemagician Archimedes, that will allow him to, yes, time travel and help MAGAfy World War II. More or less. “Yesterday belongs to us, Mr. Jones,” Mikkelsen hisses at one point. Kander and Ebb wept.
And thus kicks off a 2.5 hour rollercoaster ride (remember the cars, horses, boats, motorcycles, trains?) for multiple parties to find the dial and avert/create disaster (but mostly it’s just Indy vs. the Nazis).
Along the way, we meet friends old and new from prior entries in the series. Much like Mangold did so effectively with Logan, we watch a man (Indy) come to grips (arguably peace) with the tumultuous threads of his life, the disappointment of looking back on it all and realizing all he has to show is a (literal) retirement clock, ultimately warily acknowledging he wouldn’t change one bit of it, even if he could.
Admittedly, watching one’s childhood screen idol wrestling with the emotional and physical storm of aging is haunting, mixed as it is with my own awareness of how quickly time travels. I sat there, gazing at the screen at fifty years old, with the same awe I had when I was nine soaking up Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time, thinking, “Wait, is Han Solo allowed to be in another movie!?” Indeed, he was and is little Roy … and we have been all the better for it.
From The Standard: “Good things can come out of rage,” [Fleabag creator and Emmy-winning star Phoebe] Waller-Bridge said in an interview with the Guardian. A director once told her that she has the “gift of rage”. It made her want to find the rage in the characters she writes. “Once you know what makes someone angry, you can tell a lot about that person.” When asked what makes her angry, she replied: “I feel rage about casual and systemic sexism. I feel rage at how quickly the double standards could be balanced if men gave women the back up they need to stop us having to shout into our own vaginas all the time. But mainly I rage at myself for my own ability to let things slide because I’d rather be ‘nice’ than stand up for myself in an uncomfortable situation. My characters have streaks of fearlessness. I get a rush writing women who don’t care what you think. Probably to help me grow into being one.”
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[Image Source: Wikipedia]
“Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else.”
“How strange when an illusion dies. It’s as though you’ve lost a child.”
“I’ve always taken ‘The Wizard of Oz’ very seriously, you know. I believe in the idea of the rainbow. And I’ve spent my entire life trying to get over it. ”
– Judy Garland
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“Get over it.” Such an odd expression, and typically employed when someone else wants you to just move past something because your fixation upon whatever “it” may be is annoying to them, NOT because the speaker actually has a vested interest in your emotional well-being or in true resolution.
[Image Source: Wikipedia]
Trauma never truly leaves us. That is the common theme in the two tour-de-force performances I had the good fortune of viewing last week: Renee Zellweger’s Oscar-buzzy turn as Judy Garland in Judy and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s National Theatre-in-cinemas broadcast of her one woman show Fleabag (which inspired the critically-acclaimed tv series of the same name).
More pointedly, in our patriarchal culture, trauma is the chief instrument of torture and control employed to bludgeon, isolate, and shame bright, brilliant, willful women.
[Image Source: Wikipedia]
Judy Garland blazed like a supernova through her short life, her mistreatment as a child star yielding an adulthood riddled with addiction and anxiety which in turn engendered a final days stage persona that was raw, evocative, cathartic, electric, and unforgettable.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s unbridled wit and wisdom are discomforting in the best ways, with a delivery both inviting and unsettling, speaking truths nobody expects to hear with a wink and a smile. In this sense, she’s a spiritual heir to the unpredictable live wire act of Judy Garland’s latter years. Blessedly, we live in a time, challenged and challenging as it may be, that awards Waller-Bridge with a well-deserved Emmy coronation (last week), as opposed to running her into the ground (so far).
[Image Source: Wikipedia]
Neither Judy nor Fleabag (Waller-Bridge’s character is never named) can catch a break. Are their tragic circumstances of their own devising or are they symptomatic of a society that doesn’t quite know what to do with human beings that defy categorization? The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
Judy, like Fleabag, began life as a stage show, in this instance titled End of the Rainbow. The narrative details the final tumultuous days of screen legend Judy Garland’s career (portrayed with affection by an often unrecognizable Renee Zellweger). In the film, Garland takes up a concert residency in London to make ends meet and hopefully save up enough dough to reclaim her young children Lorna and Joey from her adversarial ex Sid Luft (the redoubtable Rufus Sewell at his glowering, wounded best).
[Image Source: Wikipedia]
As Garland bounces around London, dodging her beleaguered handler Rosalyn Wilder (a wry Jessie Buckley) and falling into the arms of a starstruck gigolo Mickey Deans (a dishy but surprisingly wan Finn Wittrock), the isolation of her fame and the collective contempt for her basic human needs send her spiraling to the point of no return. Judy isn’t overtly a film about misogyny, and yet it is a movie about nothing but misogyny.
[Image Source: Wikipedia]
The clunky flashbacks to Garland’s tortured youth on the MGM backlot are teleplay hackneyed, save for the looming specter of Louis B. Mayer (a really creepy Richard Cordery). He haunts the young Judy at every turn, squelching her rare moments of joy with a steady assault of body-shaming, victim-blaming, and outright gaslighting. The film posits that Garland’s shaky self-esteem, brittle persona, and desire to be a good mother above all else were deeply rooted in those brutal early years. Zellweger is at her best in the film’s second and third acts, as the betrayals mount and her tenuous grasp on reality slips further away, her white hot (and justifiable) rage finding its perfect outlet in her jagged, jazzy, jittery concert magic.
[Image Source: Wikipedia]
Beyond Zellweger’s remarkable physicality and her vocal performance (not exactly mimicking Garland but evoking her essence), the heart and soul of the film rests in a pivotal sequence when Judy seeks safe harbor with a pair of stage door fans: Dan and Stan (charming Andy Nyman and Daniel Cerqueira), a middle-aged gay couple who have spent every penny they have to view the chanteuse perform night after night. She asks them plaintively, “Want to go get dinner?” Like any groupies, they are overjoyed by the request but then horrified when they discover every restaurant in town is closed and all they have to offer her is a plate of runny scrambled eggs in their humble flat. The scene in the couple’s apartment is quiet and heartwarming and devastating as the trio unearths their kinship as marginalized beings, hated by society for the very attributes that set them beautifully apart.
[Image Source: Wikipedia]
The spiky id of the outcast also finds perfect expression in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, whether in television series form or in its original stage production. Waller-Bridge is an exceptional writer, but her ability as a performer to channel righteous indignation into a kind of rubbery guffaw over the arbitrary etiquette of modern living is damn genius. Seeing the stage show, it becomes clear that the tv series softens some of the title character’s edges, not diminishing her power but making her just a tetch more palatable to observe week after week. The stage production pulls no punches – nor are there any winsome appearances by Andrew Scott (Sherlock‘s Moriarty) as her fox-fearing, besotted priest boyfriend, alas – and the stage show is that much stronger as a result.
The stage character Fleabag may or may not be responsible ultimately for the suicide of her best friend, for the business failures of her guinea-pig themed cafe, for her fractured relations with her sister and father and stepmother, but she has ultimate agency. Every bad choice she makes is fully her own, as she careens through a world that is plagued with little wit and even less color. Fleabag just wants to feel. Something. Anything. And she uses sex in a failed overture to reclaim the narrative and to bring some kind of engagement with the zombies surrounding her. Not unlike the Judy Garland of Judy, the stage version of the Fleabag character spins into increasingly desperate situations, befuddled by the contempt people hold for her unyielding spark. Unlike Judy whose life ends with a tragic whimper, Fleabag’s tale ends with a defiant “f*ck off” as she tells a potential employer where, literally, he can go.
[Image Source: Wikipedia]
So, maybe there’s hope yet. Good things can come from rage.
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I’m gonna love you like nobody’s loved you
Come rain or come shine
High as a mountain and deep as a river
Come rain or come shine
I guess when you met me, it was just one of those things
But don’t you ever bet me, ’cause I’m gonna be true if you let me
You’re gonna love me like nobody’s loved me
Come rain or come shine
We’ll be happy together, unhappy together
Now won’t that be just fine?
The days may be cloudy or sunny
We’re in or we’re out of the money
But I’m with you always
I’m with you rain or shine
Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital). In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan. My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.
Ah, summer. The time we all look forward to all year long … until it’s actually here. We get to be outside. We get to do back-breaking yard-work. We get to enjoy the sun. We get to sweat through our dress clothes every day at work. We get to escape our troubles watching one blockbuster movie after another in the soothingly air-conditioned multiplex. We get to pay through the nose to be bombarded by an unyielding series of overblown, unwatchable chase scenes as latex-clad superheroes and blaster-wielding space-farers (most of them now owned in whole or in part by Disney) battle for the hearts and minds of John Q. Public.
[Image Source: Wikipedia]
Here we are, 2018. We’ve already witnessed Marvel’s Avengers storm cinemas, and I’m still a bit shell-shocked by what I did (and didn’t) see. Now, we steel ourselves for the one-two punch of Deadpool 2 (produced by 20th Century Fox in affiliation with Marvel Entertainment … though as Wall Street tells us Fox is soon to be owned outright by Marvel/Disney) and Solo: A Star Wars Story (released by Disney’s LucasFilm studio, less than six months after The Last Jedi underwhelmed some and thrilled a few more). I was prepared for the worst, and I was pleasantly surprised by both.
I thought the original Deadpoolwas a breath of fresh (raunchy) air, a genius bit of commerce that simultaneously lampooned the superhero genre (in the broadest Tex Avery-style possible) while laughing its red-and-black-ski-masked head all the way to the bank. I feared Deadpool 2 would be a stultifying, self-indulgent, self-satisfied, bloated, and unnecessary money-grab. The brainchild of producer and star Ryan Reynolds, Deadpool 2 welcomes a new director David Leitch (Atomic Blonde, John Wick) and a new raison d’etre. After burning the cape-and-cowl zeitgeist to the ground with the first flick, this latest chapter imbues our titular anti-hero with a compelling backstory and a heartbreaking new frenemy (Josh Brolin’s superb-I-won’t-break-character-for-any-bit-of-tomfoolery “Cable”) … while still frying our retinas and shaming us for any adoration we may still hold for these kind of films. And, yeah, admittedly it’s still kind of an unnecessary and bloated money-grab.
[Image Source: Wikipedia]
Nonetheless, I had a ball. I would have loved to have had 30 minutes of my life back from its lengthy run-time, but I had a ball.
(What happened to the fine art of the perfectly paced 90 minute or 1 hour 45 minute movie? Have filmmakers forgotten the time-tested strategy of “leaving the audience wanting more”? Asking for a friend …)
[Image Source: Wikipedia]
Similarly, I was wary that Solo: A Star Wars Story, with its troubled production history, would be a bust. LEGO Movie and 22 Jump Streethelmers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller had filmed nearly 90% of the movie when they were unceremoniously booted in the 11th hour and replaced with Ron Howard. Further, there is much hand-wringing this weekend in the House of Mouse that the latest Star Wars installment only broke $100 million domestic. Boo hoo.
Well, Solo is pretty damn fun and utterly heartfelt and overall a delight … and also would greatly benefit from having a tighter running time.
[Image Source: Wikipedia]
I’ll be blasphemous for a moment (I can’t wait for the comments). I actually like Alden Ehrenreich’s take on the title role. Solo details the “origin story” of this legendary character first portrayed by Harrison Ford, detailing Solo’s misspent youth meeting cute with Chewbacca, Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover, running rings around Billy Dee Williams), and, um, the Millennium Falcon. I thought Ford was gangbusters as Indiana Jones, but his Han Solo was occasionally too aloof, too smug for the “scruffy nerf-herder” he actually was purported to be. Ehrenreich brings a refreshing “little boy lost” quality to the role, not dissimilar to Chris Pine’s blessed de-Shatnerizing of the iconic role of Captain Kirk in the recent Star Trek reboot. My two cents. Let the hateration commence.
[Image Source: Wikipedia]
Both Deadpool 2 and Solo are glorified heist movies, employing the “building the perfect team to complete the perfect job” conceit as an excuse to explore what it means to be a family. The best heist flicks (Channing Tatum’s Logan Lucky a great recent example) present us a collection of colorful, misdirected ne’er-do-wells who discover a higher reason for being – the fellowship of man – on their way to doing something truly despicable. Deadpool even offers us the poetic bon mot “family is not an ‘f’-word” as our favorite mutant mercenary loses his true love (a luminous Morena Bacarin) and fills his broken heart with a collection of wackadoodle buddies (the aforementioned Brolin as “Cable,” Stefan Kapičić as a comically CGI’d “Colossus,” Zazie Beetz as a dynamite take-no-prisoners “Domino,” and Leslie Uggams as Deadpool’s cantankerous roommate “Blind Al”).
[Image Source: Wikipedia]
Likewise, Solo is populated with a rogues’ gallery of character players. Woody Harrelson, Thandie Newton, Phoebe Waller-Bridge (her feisty, feminist, rabble-rousing ‘droid L3-37 deserves her own outing ASAP), Paul Bettany, Jon Favreau, Joonas Suotamo, and aforementioned Donald Glover all turn in standout moments in an otherwise overstuffed enterprise. Emilia Clarke is particularly impactful as Han Solo’s hometown love Qi’ra, resisting “femme fatale” cliches and presenting a conflict-ridden soul who will persevere by golly, despite a galaxy-full of misogynistic roadblocks. (I also must note that the train-robbing scene in Solo is one of the crispest staged action sequences in the Star Wars series in quite a while.)
Neither film is perfect, nor does either need to be. We have become a film-going culture that consumes its heroes in episodic narrative gulps – as if Charles Dickens had written in less prosaic terms about people who wore tight pants and could bend steel with their bare hands. Wait, he didn’t?
Deadpool 2 and Solo are way-stations in their respective decades-long cinematic franchises: X-Men and Star Wars. The fact that both offer a bit of humanistic allegory – some nutrition along with their empty popcorn calories – is quite remarkable and welcome.The fact that they will both sell truckloads of overpriced action figures and smirkingly ironic t-shirts is a given. Welcome to 21st century America.
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Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital). In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan. My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.
I guess when you met me, it was just one of those things
Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking