Monthly Archives: December 2017

Gary Oldman Shines in Darkest Hour

The biopic, Darkest Hour (directed by Joe Wright), follows Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman) through his early days as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. As the film begins, “Peace for our time” Neville Chamberlain’s (Ronald Pickup) disastrous policies have come home to roost, Hitler is threatening all of Europe, and Chamberlain is forced to resign as Prime Minister. Unpopular among his own party but considered acceptable to the Opposition, Churchill is summoned by King George VI (Ben Mendelsohn) to become the new Prime Minister.

Darkest Hour is primarily a character study of Churchill, and Oldman clearly relishes the role and fully immerses himself in it. He gives the audience an admittedly flawed Churchill, hopelessly politically incorrect by current standards, who nevertheless possesses a passionate loyalty to the British Empire and an unbreakable determination to see the British people through what seemed an almost hopeless situation at that stage of the war.

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Star Wars: The Last Jedi – Suddenly Jar Jar Binks Doesn’t Seem So bad

Star Wars: The Last Jedi achieves the near impossible task of making the wretched prequels look like beautifully written masterpieces and George Lucas’ dialogue seem brilliant. It’s unmitigated crap from the very get-go.

After the obligatory text crawl, this 152-minute agony-fest leaps right into General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) pacing his bridge as he closes in on the Resistance base. Apparently, Mr. Gleeson thought he was in a theater-in-the-park production of The Pirates of Penzance. I expected him to burst into a rendition of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” at any moment. And then things started to go downhill fast.

It would take a novel to detail all this movie’s sins, so, for the sake of readability, I will limit myself to the most egregious infractions.

Adam Driver, reprising his role as Kylo Ren, once again fails to be even slightly menacing. There’s just no way to take this guy seriously as a Big Bad, no matter how many force powers he throws around. Even so, he comes off better than most by simply managing to be an actual character. No one else in the film accomplishes this. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Leia (the late Carrie Fisher), Finn (John Boyega), Poe (Oscar Isaac), and vapid newcomer Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) are all soulless puppets, blandly performing their assigned tasks and reciting seemingly endless speeches. Rey (Daisy Ridley), supposedly the main protagonist, is little more than a piece of uninteresting scenery. The worst failing in this department is Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis). He has zero character development and zero backstory. Without so much as a hint about who he is or where he came from, he becomes nothing more than a stock bad guy figuratively twirling his mustache and cackling as he ties Rey to the railroad tracks.

Adam Driver in Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Adam Driver in Star Wars: The Last Jedi

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