Short takes: ‘Michael Clayton’ and ‘Silence’

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 29, 2023

One of the best movies that I’ve watched recently was Michael Clayton, the 2007 drama starring George Clooney that straddles the territory of corporate thriller, legal drama and character study.

Clooney is the title character, an attorney at a prominent New York law firm who specializes in estate law but truly earns his keep as a fixer who keeps bad situations from becoming worse ones. The divorced Clayton is struggling with personal issues — his relationship with his young son and ex-wife aren’t great, and his drug-addled brother has left the attorney cleaning up and covering costs on an expensive restaurant venture that went belly up long before it started to pay for itself. Moreover, Clayton’s firm is rumored to be in merger talks with another legal establishment. That’s made plenty of workers anxious about their long-term job security, not least among them Clayton, whose value as an employee isn’t reflected by traditional metrics such as billable hours.

In the midst of this, one of the firm’s biggest cash cows — defending agriculture giant U-North in a long-running class-action lawsuit over an allegedly deadly chemical product — threatens to explode when the lead attorney, Arthur Edens (the late great Tom Wilkinson), starts acting bizarrely during a deposition.

J.J. Abrams caps an iconic space-opera franchise with the flashy but not necessarily compelling ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 20, 2020

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the 11th entry in the blockbuster space opera, opens with a blast from the past. As the series’ signature opening crawl that follows the film’s title (see previous sentence) and episode number (nine) announces:

The dead speak! The galaxy has heard a mysterious broadcast, a threat of REVENGE in the sinister voice of the late EMPEROR PALPATINE.

GENERAL LEIA ORGANA dispatches secret agents to gather intelligence, while REY, the last hope of the Jedi, trains for battle against the diabolical FIRST ORDER.

Meanwhile, Supreme Leader KYLO REN rages in search of the phantom Emperor, determined to destroy any threat to his power…

Director J.J. Abrams, who directed the 2009 Star Trek reboot and its first sequel and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, among other projects, and who helped create the TV series Alias and Lost, thusly sets up the climax to the third Star Wars trilogy before a single planet, object or person appears on screen. If The Force Awakens, which launched the franchise’s latest trio in 2015, recapitulated George Lucas’s first Star Wars, retroactively titled A New Hope (1977), and The Last Jedi (2017) took The Empire Strikes Back (1980) as its template, then The Rise of Skywalker, released in December 2019, is here to replay 1983’s Return of the Jedi for audiences young and old.

Rebels on the run: The evil First Order tirelessly hunts good guys in the sprawling ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
May 3, 2018

Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the eighth entry in the projected nine-movie space opera sequence that George Lucas launched in 1977, is a messy but entertaining addition to the saga.

Writer-director Rian Johnson, who’s best known for the 2012 time-traveling drama Looper, splits his sequel to 2015’s The Force Awakens into four interwoven threads. All are set into motion by the nefarious First Order’s pursuit of the Resistance — now in the process of being rebranded as the Rebellion, just like the insurgency from Lucas’s original trilogy. This premise (or at least the timing in play here) is rather confusing, because the narrative involving Rey (Daisy Ridley) and self-exiled Jedi Master Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) picks up literally right where it ended in the preceding film’s coda, which happened shortly after the good guys won a major victory over wicked Snoke (motion-capture legend Andy Serkis), the First Order’s shriveled, misshapen Supreme Leader.

At any rate, as an embittered Skywalker — the missing man being hunted by both sides in Episode VII — adamantly refuses to train Rey in the ways of the magical Force or do anything else to aid the Rebellion, most of the other characters have hastily evacuated their compromised (once-hidden?) base and are fleeing at top speed. A powerful First Order fleet pursues, lurking just outside of cannon range until the inevitable moment the insurgents run out of fuel.

Bereft of outside assistance and perceiving their plight as hopeless, hotheaded pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) and First Order defector Finn (John Boyega) devise a plan to disable the new technology that Snoke and his minions have used to track the good guys’ jumps through hyperspace. Finn and his new friend, technician Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) visit a lavish casino in hopes of finding and co-opting a codebreaker with the ability to infiltrate the First Order fleet’s hulking flagship, the Supremacy. Dameron stays behind with the remnants of the rebel convoy, attempting to persuade the tentative Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern) to take decisive action in lieu of General Leia Organa (the late Carrie Fisher), who was put into a coma by a First Order attack.

Among the stars, war: ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ revives a classic space opera but isn’t as compelling as the originals

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Jan. 7, 2015

Star Wars: The Force Awakens brings together a mix of old and new characters from the mega-successful science-fiction movie series in order to launch a new sequence of cinematic space adventures.

But you probably already know that.

The plot of Star Wars: The Force Awakens is set in motion by a search for Luke Skywalker, the hero who helped topple the evil Galactic Empire at the conclusion of the original Star Wars film trilogy. The missing Jedi, who wields the mystical, magical power of the Force, is sought on the one hand by the evil First Order, an Imperial remnant that retains its predecessor’s taste for mass destruction, and on the other hand by the Resistance, an ill-defined successor to the Rebel Alliance that is long on scrappiness and diversity but seemingly short on everything else.

But you probably already know that, too, because this movie has been selling tickets like gangbusters. Before it was in theaters for three weeks, The Force Awakens earned $1.5 billion worldwide, making it the sixth-highest-grossing feature in history — all without even having opened in the world’s second-largest film market. If the picture is as popular in China as it’s been elsewhere, it could just be a matter of days before the seventh Star Wars movie overtakes Avatar’s $2.8 billion in tickets sold to become the most successful movie of all time.

Which frankly leaves me feeling somewhat baffled, because while The Force Awakens — or Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens, to use the complete title — is an occasionally enjoyable movie, I’m hard-pressed to call it a great one. Director J.J. Abrams and his fellow screenwriters, Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt, extend the space saga originally created by George Lucas mainly by updating the formula of the original Star Wars and adding a handful of new characters.