Rogue One (Gareth Edwards, 2016)

Felicity Jones and Diego Luna in Rogue One

Jyn Erso: Felicity Jones
Cassian Andor: Diego Luna
Galen Erso: Mads Mikkelsen
Saw Gerrera: Forest Whitaker
Bodhi Rook: Riz Ahmed
K-2SO: Alan Tudyk (voice)
Chirrut Îmwe: Donnie Yen
Baze Malbus: Wen Jiang
Orson Krennic: Ben Mendelsohn
Governor Tarkin: Guy Henry
Bail Organa: Jimmy Smits

Director: Gareth Edwards
Screenplay: Chris Weitz, Tony Gilroy, John Knoll, Gary Whitta
Cinematography: Greig Fraser
Production design: Doug Chiang, Neil Lamont
Music: Michael Giacchino

It takes a lot of work (and money) to sustain a myth. Rogue One, the first of the standalone (i.e., not an official Star Wars episode) films based on George Lucas's corpus of myth about a galaxy far away and a long time ago, doesn't really stand alone. It's there to plug a hole in the larger Star Wars narrative: How could the Empire have been so careless as to leave a critical vulnerability in the Death Star, so that Luke Skywalker could take advantage of it as easily as he used to bullseye womp rats in his T-16? It was, of course, an inside job, a bit of sabotage by an engineer named Galen Erso. So what we have in Rogue One is essentially Star Wars: Episode 3.5. I've got no problem with that, except that it hardly seems worth two hours and 13 minutes or $200 million to fill a plot gap. It also feels like a waste of a splendidly capable cast to create vivid and heroic characters only to kill them all off by the end of the movie. Or to reanimate (literally) an actor who died in 1994 to give the illusion of continuity between films: If we can accept that James Bond can be played by many actors, or that the entire crew of the Starship Enterprise can be "rebooted" for a new series of Star Trek films, why shouldn't we accept that someone other than Peter Cushing could play Grand Moff (here he's just a general) Tarkin? There's something macabre about superimposing a dead man's face on a live actor's, and I hope Guy Henry got paid well for playing Tarkin from the neck down. These objections aside, Rogue One is a well-played war movie, with just enough resemblance to real wars to make it somewhat unsettling: The scenes in the capital of Jedha have an eerie similarity to recent news footage coming out of cities in Syria and Iraq, and the combat in tropical Scarif evokes any number of war movies set in Vietnam or in the South Pacific during World War II. In fact, Rogue One may be the most visceral and depressing film in the Star Wars canon.

Watched on Netflix

Y Tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001)

Gael García Bernal in Y Tu Mamá También

Luisa Cortés: Maribel Verdú
Julio Zapata: Gael García Bernal
Tenoch Iturbide: Diego Luna
Narrator: Daniel Giménez Cacho
Silvia Allende de Iturbide: Diana Bracho
Diego "Saba" Madero: Andrés Almeida
Ana Morelos: Ana López Mercado
Manuel Huerta: Nathan Grinberg
Maria Eugenia Calles de Huerta: Verónica Langer
Cecilia Huerta: Maria Aura
Alejandro "Jano" Montes de Oca: Juan Carlos Remolina
Chuy: Silverio Palacios

Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Screenplay: Carlos Cuarón, Alfonso Cuarón
Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki
Production design: Marc Bedia, Miguel Ángel Álvarez
Film editing: Alfonso Cuarón, Alex Rodríguez

Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También is kept aloft for so long by wit and energy, and by the skills of its actors, director, and cinematographer, that it's a disappointment to consider the way it deflates a little at the end. It is, on the whole, a brilliant transfiguration of several well-worn genres: the teen sex comedy, the road movie, the coming-of-age fable. Cuarón has credited Jean-Luc Godard's Masculin Féminin (1966) as a major inspiration, but I think it owes as much to François Truffaut's Jules and Jim (1962), not least in Daniel Giménez Cacho's superbly ironic voiceover narrator, who provides a larger context for the actions of the three main characters. It's the narrator, for instance, who tells us that the traffic jam that holds up our middle-class teenagers was caused by the death of a working man who tried to cross the freeway because otherwise he would have had to walk a mile and a half out of his way to use the only crossing bridge. Or that Chuy, the fisherman who befriends the trio when they finally reach the secluded beach, will lose his livelihood to developers and commercial fisheries and wind up as a janitor in an Acapulco hotel. Somehow, Cuarón manages to avoid heavy-handedness with these comments, injecting the necessary amount of serious social commentary into a story about two horny Mexico City teenagers and the older woman who goes in search of a beach called "Heaven's Mouth" with them. Even in the story, the subtext of social class in contemporary Mexico keeps peeking through: There's a slight tension between the upper-middle-class Tenoch, whose father is a government official, and the lower-middle-class Julio that's suggestive of Tenoch's sense of privilege. Similarly, Luisa, who was trained as a dental technician, confesses to a sense of inferiority to her husband, Jano, Tenoch's cousin, and his better-educated friends. The screenplay by Cuarón and his brother, Carlos, deserved the Oscar nomination it received for these attempts to provide a deep backstory for the characters. Even so, the film owes much to the obvious rapport between Luna and García Bernal, and to the steady centering influence of Verdú, all of whom participated in rehearsals that were often improvisatory embroidering on the Cuaróns's screenplay. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who would go on to receive three consecutive Oscars for much showier work on Cuarón's Gravity (2013) and on Alejandro Iñárritu's Birdman (2104) and The Revenant (2015), here maintains a strictly documentary style of camerawork, though often with the subtle use of long takes and wide-angle lenses. As I said, I think the film deflates a bit at the end with the revelation of Luisa's death: It seems an unnecessary attempt to moralize, to provide a motive -- knowing that she has terminal cancer -- for her running away and having sex with the boys, turning it into only a final fling. Would we think less of Luisa if she were simply asserting her right to be as pleasure-driven as her philandering husband? Were the Cuaróns attempting to obviate slut-shaming by giving Luisa cancer? I hope not, because the film shows such intelligence and sensitivity otherwise.