Gringo (2018)

rating: ****

the story: A ruthless company attempts to use one of its most loyal employees as a patsy in Mexico.

review: When I saw the trailer for Gringo, I thought it looked like a delightful farce.  I was interested in it anyway, as it starred Charlize Theron and Joel Edgerton, two of my favorite modern actors.  But more intriguing, from the trailer, was David Oyelowo, the would-be patsy whose reactions were hilariously over-the-top to the chaos happening around him.

And that's what you get the movie itself, too, and that's more than satisfying.  The best part is that it casts Oyelowo in an entirely new light, for me.  I was previously exposed to him only, as far as I know, in Selma, where I thought he was horribly miscast as Martin Luther King, Jr., and as a result I didn't think much of him as an actor in general.  But Gringo proves me wrong.  Selma's problems don't seem to have been Oyelowo's problems at all, its creative shortcomings a result of the creative process.  Gringo is what the creative process working the right way looks like.

At heart it's a massive criticism of how greedy the business sector continues to be, long after the supposed "greed decade" of the '80s.  Theron and Edgerton (whose brother Nash directed the movie) play the business colleagues trying to save their own skins at Oyelowo's expense.  Edgerton famously has a passive face, expressionless, and I think it held him back early in his career, but he's managed to work around it thanks to his considerable acting chops (best exemplified, I think, in Warrior and Exodus: Gods and Kings), to the point where he can guide his own career now.  His ruthless businessman in Gringo in particular uses his peculiar screen presence to full advantage, that passive face playing into is callousness as he tries to have his cake and eat it, too, backstabbing the haplessly loyal and trusting Oyelowo (until Oyelowo realizes that he's been had and turns the tables on him).

Sharlto Copley, who moreso than director Neill Blomkamp managed to parlay District 9 into a fascinating career, plays Edgerton and Theron's muscle who ends up siding with Oyelowo, and is another great presence in the movie.  There's also Thandie Newton (can't believe she was ever allowed to vanish from the forefront), Amanda Seyfried, and Alan Ruck in supporting roles.

Gringo is a movie I think could very easily settle into a cult favorite, and a career highlight for a number of its actors, especially Oyelowo.

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

rating: ****

the story: Han Solo emerges from the ship-building grind of life on Corellia to become an intergalactic outlaw.

what it's all about: Incredibly, there seems to be a lot of discontent among Star Wars fans for a Han Solo origin movie.  It's franchise fatigue.  It happens to every franchise.  If this is how you feel about Solo, move along.  Move along.

In the new era of Star Wars movies, where George Lucas is no longer the guiding hand of the saga and there are movies that don't directly continue the saga...this might just be the first one capable of establishing it own legacy.  Maybe not right away.  Let pesky fans attempt to spoil it.  Give it time.  Pesky fans can't spoil the fun forever.  This is the second "anthology" movie of the franchise.  The first one, Rogue One, I thought was a horrible disaster.  Fans didn't.  They loved it.  I thought it came to all the wrong conclusions about what Star Wars is all about, and was lazy about...everything.  If that was what Star Wars was going to be for a new generation, I shuddered for the future.  But Solo makes things right.

There's a lot to unpack here.

One of the things Solo does is nudge what's at the heart of Star Wars, whether or not George Lucas envisioned it as a response to Vietnam.  That's one of the things Rogue One most misunderstood.  It mistakenly correlated opposition to Vietnam with...tacit approval of terrorism in the Middle East.  It really did.  Solo handles it very differently.  At one point Han has actually become a recruit of the Empire, and he finds himself in the latest in a series of campaigns he can't begin to comprehend, and he asks aloud what their objective is.  In the post-Vietnam era, that's warfare.  After WWII settled the last of the major international conflicts, the Cold War made it impossible for countries of comparable development to even consider engaging in open combat.  The threat of nuclear assault made it unthinkable.  Europe found itself depleted of real influence, and that left the US, the Soviets/Russia, and whoever wanted to be considered emerging powers, and this was usually determined with the achievement of nuclear weapons or the ambition to attain them.  If a country didn't have them?  So that's what Vietnam was, what Afghanistan was, what Iraq was.  It was different warfare.  Incomprehensible, to most perspectives.  Han doesn't really say it's unjustifiable.  Actually, he ends up with a group of thieves who are doing pretty much the same sort of thing as the Empire, just on a much smaller scale.  The Rebellion isn't depicted as terrorists, but as intermediaries interested in stopping the random exploitation of others.  I personally interpret that to take at least some of the edge off comparisons between the US and the Empire, whether or not you ever realized they were there.  And I see it as a direct response to Rogue One. 

Anyway, to return back to purely movie matters, Solo also is heavily engaged in reclaiming, well, Han Solo.  Everyone's Han Solo these days.  Tony Stark is Han Solo.  Peter Quill is Han Solo.  James T. Kirk is Han Solo.  Even Jack Sparrow is Han Solo.  So it only seems fitting that Han Solo gets to be Han Solo again.  We last saw him in The Force Awakens, the first of the new sequels, getting killed by his own son.  After the events of Return of the Jedi, Han seems to have backslid into the kind of life he had before A New Hope.  That, and the whole being-killed-by-his-own-son thing, kind of put a damper on him, and Star Wars in general.  Solo kind of explains what happened, how that could've happened, and it once and for explains what makes Han Solo, well, Han Solo, and what separates him from everyone else who wants to be Han Solo.

Han had a girl back home.  Han had to leave the girl behind.  Han eventually reunites with the girl.  Happy ending?  The girl doesn't die!  But no, that's not how the movie ends.  The movie ends with them deciding to go separate ways.  Along with everything else that happens to him during the course of Solo, Han seems to decide forming long-term attachments is probably always going to be difficult.  Chewie is different.  Chewie sticks around, it seems, because they both know if Chewie ever wanted to leave, he can.  At one point Han does say goodbye to Chewie in what he seems to think of as a permanent kind of way, but in pretty short order Chewie's back at his side.  The movie is really about Han's relationship with a mentor figure who does everything he can to give Han a cynical outlook.  By the time we catch up with Han again in A New Hope, that cynical outlook has taken a firm hold of his thought process, but by the end of Solo he doesn't have it yet.  Despite everything he experiences he's much closer to being the good guy he ultimately proves to be. 

But we're given every indication that refusing to be called a good guy, at the end of Solo, is what leads to that cynical outlook, refusing to accept that he can depend on others.  Losing the girl is that first chink.  Forget being betrayed by the mentor.  That's nothing! 

The movie otherwise presents itself as the modern era version of Han Solo.  Everyone who's attempted to be Han Solo, that's what this movie consciously evokes.  He gets a Guardians of the Galaxy crew around him, including a mouthy CGI guy (voiced by Jon Favreau).  Alden Ehrenreich gets to give his own performance.  Unlike Rogue One's horribly botched Tarkin, he isn't asked to imitate someone else.  Harrison Ford is Harrison Ford.  Instead, Ehrenreich feels a lot more like Chris Pine.  True, he's not much like Tony Stark or Jack Sparrow, but that's a good thing.  Those were much bigger departures from the archetype, took it places Han Solo ultimately never went.  They permanently rogues.  Han ultimately isn't. 

Emilia Clarke gets another shot at striking big in another franchise (she's the face of Game of Thrones; she didn't really replace anyone's idea of Sarah Connor in Terminator Genisys) as Han's girl.  Paul Bettany is her boss, Woody Harrelson is Han's mentor.  Thandie Newton shows up, but it's hard to recognize her.  Donald Glover plays Lando Calrissian.  I love Glover, but he seems to have chosen to underplay the part.  Lando's droid plays up that unspoken aspect of Star Wars lore, the subservient nature of droids.  Ironically or not it gets plugged into the Millennium Falcon and pretty much forgotten.  Lando and Han's scenes seem inspired by Maverick.

I'll always be a Star Wars fan.  I love the original trilogy.  I love the prequels.  I love what the sequels have done so far.  I hated Rogue One.  I think Solo sums up, with one movie, what Star Wars is all about (minus the Force).  I love how it explains the famous Kessel Run.  Genius.  That alone makes the whole experience worth it.