Review: Klaus

Klaus (2019): Written by Sergio Pablos, Jim Mahoney, and Zach Lewis, directed by Sergio Pablos. Starring: Jason Schwartzman, J. K. Simmons, Rashida Jones, Will Sasso, Joan Cusack, and Norm Macdonald. Running Time: 97 minutes.

Rating: 3.5/4

               The scene of holiday films has been a rather stuffed one for a long time. The canon of truly great Christmas films seems set in stone, and most new ones that come out fail to make much of an impact and are easily forgotten, if indeed anyone sees them at all. Every so often, though, one breaks through, one that finds a new angle on a tale so worked over I expected I could never be surprised again. Klaus, the directorial debut of Sergio Pablos after a long career of animating for both Disney and Dreamworks, is one such film. It's a sweet and charming alternative take on the origins of Santa Claus that just hit Netflix, and whose discovery added an extra sparkle to my holidays.

               We begin in as different a setting as any, a military-like complex for postmen, where Jesper, the lazy and wholly unambitious son of the owning family, is finally forced to take responsibility for his life when he is sent far, far north to Smeerensburg. The freezing, ice-covered town has a legendary reputation for its gloomy, despondent, and backwards atmosphere, stoked by a long-running "Hatfield/McCoy" style fued between its two main families, the Ellingboes and the Krums. He is given a clear goal of 6,000 postmarked letters to be sent within the town by year's end, otherwise he'll be stuck there and cut off from the family riches.

               His introduction to the place is as hilariously inept as you would imagine, and he soons starts to worry that he's got no chance in hell of meeting his target. His despair at ever finding a way out of the place is further stoked by the local boatman (Norm Macdonald) and schoolteacher (Rashida Jones), both of whom have long since given up ever changing the poisonous dynamics of the town. Things start to turn, though, when he decides to make one last effort and travel across the island to the home of a lonesome woodsman, the physically huge Klaus. Voiced by the ever-magnificent J. K. Simmons, he is reticent and surly, but has a clear love and passion for making children smile. After discovering that the man is a gifted craftsman of toys and has a whole warehouse filled with amazing contraptions, Jesper decides that this could be his ticket out; he begins to slowly improvise and spread tales of the magical Klaus through the children of the town, eventually convincing them to abandon bad behavior and the fights of their parents in favor of good deeds and writing letters (postmarked by Jesper personally, of course) in the hopes of getting a new toy by the next morning.

               The animation is CGI, but with a different look and texture that makes it feel fresh and unique; the images are beautiful and flowing, yet look almost like woodcuts, or hand-drawn images from an old children's book. The town starts out forbidding and gray, but color and light, as well as wind, are used to great effect in bringing the screen to life when the story needs it most. The score is equally affecting as well, though the movie could have gone without the handful of moments when a pop song comes up, as those are the parts of the film most likely to feel dated later on.

               The voice acting is a lot of fun as well, with Simmons as the clear highlight; he is a perfect voice for Santa, a voice so fitting that a) I can't believe it took this long for him to do the role, and b) I don't know if I can ever go back to another Klaus again. The take on what leads to him becoming the bringer of joy and gifts is a different angle as well, a man of true heart struggling to deal with his own past while still not losing that spark of love that makes him a truly special person. There is a backstory, but it's handled effectively without overindulging in unneeded details, and the resolution at the end of the film involving both his and Jesper's fate is (without spoiling) genuinely magical.

               If there are quips to be had, it's where the fact that this is a children's film clearly affected the narrative in a few places; the conflicts that occur between the "good" characters are set up and resolved along very typical lines, and they are moments the film could very well have done without. The heads of the respective families in the town, who have a vested interest in the miserable status quo continuing unchanged, insert themselves to provide a reason for a third-act action setpiece that, again, is well-done, but isn't anything we haven't seen before and simply isn't as interesting as the budding friendship between Klaus and Jesper.

               No matter. The film is content to be what it is, and what it is is a beautiful animated film that is here to offer us something new to enjoy over the holidays. This is one worth seeing with the whole family.

-Noah Franc

Review- Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019): Written by J. J. Abrams and Chris Terrio, directed by J. J. Abrams. Starring: Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fischer, Anthony Daniels, Kelly Marie Tran, Domhnall Gleeson, Lupita Nyong'o, Richard E. Grant, Naomi Ackie, Billy Dee Williams, and Ian McDiarmid. Running Time: 142 minutes.

Rating: 2/4

               The spoilers are with me. Always.

               I suppose it figures. I first expressed my doubts that J. J. Abrams could really handle the scope of something like a Star Wars trilogy way back after the garbage fire that was Star Trek Into Darkness, but after The Force Awakens proved far better than I'd expected, those doubts were largely quited. What remained of them was then blasted out the Death Star trash compactor by The Last Jedi, easily the most emotionally challenging film in the entire Star Wars canon. I specifically wrote in my review at the time that the Star Wars franchise now felt freer from all previous baggage than ever before, truly able to break out and give us something really new.

               Sadly, the contingent of emotionally dead man-boys determined to make us regret ever inventing the word "fandom" have been relentless in trying to drag Rian Johnson's name through the muck ever since, and at least part of their whinging clearly reached the ears of Abrams, ever one to try to please. The end result, a movie that (rather unfairly) carries the expectation of wholly tying together and resolving an entire generations' worth of storytelling around the Skywalker family tries so, so very hard to please everyone, but while parts of the film do soar with the best Star Wars has to offer, it makes several very clunky missteps that will, over time, only diminish its standing.

               With the Resistance still on the run and trying to regroup and the First Order reestablishing the Empire, a surprise broadcast in the voice of the supposedly-dead Emperor Palpatine (we'll get to that plot point, don't worry) sends both sides scrambling to find a way to locate the legendary homeworld of the Sith. Kylo Ren gets there first, discovering that the Emperor is indeed, somehow, still alive (unless it's a clone we're seeing, ala the old Extended Universe, but that's beside the point). He's been rebuilding a fleet equipped with planet-destroying weapons swiped from Death Star technology, and offers it and his powers to Ren in exchange for him finally tracking down and either killing or "turning" Rey. This comes with another major story reveal about Rey's parentage, which, yes, we'll get to that too.

               Rey, meanwhile, is being trained by Leia to hone her powers at the rebels' new base of operations. The reveal that Leia actually did train as a Jedi, but willingly gave up her lightsaber after deciding it wasn't her true path, is something I found rather fitting for her character, and an acceptable answer to my gripe from TFA about Leia seemingly having done nothing with her Skywalker lineage in the intervening decades. According to Abrams, the way they worked what remaining footage of Leia had into this movie allowed them to mostly match the story they had planned for her anyway, and this is one aspect of the film that is amazingly well-done. We know they had to cheat a bit to keep Leia alive, but it works remarkably well, and allows her character an exit that fits far better than simply having her die between films or CGI-ing her in would have. Your mileage may vary, but for my money, this is as fitting a farewell to our Princess as I can imagine.

               When word reaches the Rebellion that, not only is Palpatine indeed still kicking, but also threatens the galaxy with more destructive technology, Rey, Finn, and Poe, plus Chewbacca, BB-8, and C-3P0 set out to find a special piece of Sith tech that should allow them to find the Sith homeworld. This puts them on a collision course with Ren, once again seeing out Rey with the help of the strange bond they seem to share through the Force, as well as a time crunch to assemble allies and ships before the new Sith fleet can set off to wreak havoc on the galaxy.

               The film is long and packed with action and exposition, but for the most part it flows fairly well. Abrams is a solid filmmaker and knows how to provide spectacle while still pacing things at a comfortable clip. Even his usual lens flare isn't nearly as irritating, though it IS there. John Williams' score is wondrous, as always. His music has remained the unassaibly masterful part of every single film in this franchise, a level of crowning artistic achievement on par with Howard Shore's LOTR score, or the entire discography of Joe Hisaishi. I think it would be only fair to see him take home one more Oscar for this one as a mirror to the one he took home for A New Hope, oh so many years ago.

               The cast also continues to do wonders; Ridley, Boyega, and Isaac have had as wonderful and refreshing a chemistry between them as any, and their mutual scenes will be among the moments from this new trilogy that will always stand out in my mind. Adam Driver has thoroughly established himself as one of the best young actors in the business today, having proven able to take the raw, online-troll matter of Kylo Ren and make him one of the most interesting and memorable villains in the Star Wars canon. And, while his presence in this film is problematic on so, so many levels, there are good reasons why Ian McDiarmid's sneering and endlessly hateful Palpatine has become so indelibly iconic.

               Kelly Marie Tran is excellent as well, but here we cross into the troubling parts of the film, nearly all of which have to do with storytelling and narrative decisions. Tran has gone on record about being bullied off social media after The Last Jedi by the usual Gamergate/Pepe the Frog suspects, and their insufferable whining is the only reason I can think of why Rose is given such short shrift in this film. She's there and present, but very clearly shunted off to the side, having no part in the various "quests" in the film's middle act. Even more depressing, her potential romance with Finn, which provided The Last Jedi with one of its most potent scenes, has been seemingly erased entirely. As much as I found plenty to like in this film, the erasure of Rose as someone of emotional consequence to the other main characters strikes me as nothing less than an act of deep cowardice.

               This could, perhaps, have been salvaged if the final film had fulfilled the very real promise of Finn and Poe coming out as bisexual and ending up together, something that Oscar Isaac appears to have endlessly teased as something he was very much ready for. Here, too, that is punted away, with both getting new female side characters as potential past and/or future love interests as a way for the film to canonically insist that, "NOPE, no queerness here, carry on!" Again, cowardice, plain and simple.

               And with that, let's talk about Palpatine and Rey's parentage, the two greatest signs that, for all Rian Johnson's efforts, the powers-that-be in charge of Star Wars simply can't bring themselves to actually let the past die so that something new can take its place. I can think of many scenarios where an appearance in some form of Palpatine, as another spectre of the past rearing its head, could have thematically worked in this film as a way for Rey and the Resistance to truly end the Empire once and for all. But one where he had seemingly gained literal immortality and SOMEHOW survived being tossed down an air shaft in a space station about to get blown to smithereens- the sort of DBZ-esque erasure of Death that just about never works- was not one of them. It simply stretches the imagination beyond all reason, especially since Kyle Ren would have functioned well enough as a final villain for Rey to overcome.

               Rey's parentage might be the bigger betrayal of this trilogy's potential, though. Here, too, The Last Jedi had done the series a great service by being willing to toss out any lingering fan theories about Rey being a descendant of Luke, or Obi-Wan, or whoever, because the real power of both that film and the Star Wars universe in general was its promise that greatness can come from anywhere. That simple, final scene of a cleaning boy with Force powers, gazing at the stars and dreaming of more, is precisely the sort of thing that gave Star Wars its magic in the first place, the narrative importance of the Skywalkers notwithstanding.

               But of course, Abrams and his mystery box just couldn't let that be. Instead, we get a tired and drawn-out reveal about Rey being the direct granddaughter of Palpatine himself, which, no. I won't bother trying to list the ways that makes zero storytelling sense, because I respect both myself and my readers far too much to subject us all to that. Rey is a wonderful character, and the nature of the Force allows for plenty of conflict between Light and Dark without having to tie blood lineage into it. The Force truly is universal, and not the prerogative of a few families. To reduce her to just another ancestral figure, both with the reveal of her parentage as well as her symbolically adopting the Skywalker name at the end of the film, reduces her weight and imact as a person who can offer a new, different future to her world.

               This is all so frustrating because, in spite of it all, there are still plenty of grand, magical moments in this movie. All the Star Wars films, even the bad ones, have bits in them with that spark, and there is plenty of that here. Rey connecting with all the past Jedi, their voices ringing out as she gazes through light-years' worth of stars, culminating in it being Luke's voice saying that the Force will be with her, always, is an incredibly powerful sequence, as is her final visit to Luke's old home and her gaze into the dual sunset, BB-8 at her side. Even Kyle Ren's brief "turn" back to being good, though that too had its flaws, was salvaged by him at least having to sacrifice his life to ensure Rey's survival (I swear, Kylo Ren living happily ever after would have been the one unforgiveable sin, had this movie gone there). The final ship battle has a size and scale to it that I marvel at.

               This is not one of the worst Star Wars films, but it had a clear path to being one of the great ones, and in several key ways deliberately chooses to not take that path. In a way, I find that more frustrating than the bonkers, but often still admirable, ways that Lucas' prequel trilogy fell on their faces, because there was at least a clear vision being followed that didn't care what I thought about it.

               Star Wars is so many things to so many people. I don't like everything about this new trilogy, but this is a universe big enough for us all. I have the Star Wars stuff that I love, and I choose to remember and focus on that. That includes The Last Jedi, but only time will tell if I can make my peace with The Rise of Skywalker.

-Noah Franc

Films for the Trump Years, Part 16: Ken Burns' The Vietnam War

               The US War in Afghanistan began less than a month after the September 11^th terror attacks, with initial military operations commencing on October 7^th, 2001. Though many can and do quibble over how to separate and define the war's various "phases," the conflict has continuted unabated since then, and last year it surpassed Vietnam as the longest continual military conflict in American history. Casualty estimates, obviously, vary widely according to the source, and it will likely be decades after fighting ceases before solid numbers can really be established, but the most up-to-date figures range between 170,000 and 190,000 killed thus far, including over 3,500 NATO forces (US included), 60,000 apiece from the Taliban and the Afghan government, and as many as 40,000 civilians, with countless more wounded or turned into refugees.

               Almost 16 years later, on September 17^th, PBS aired the first episode of The Vietnam War, the latest series by Ken Burns, arguably the most monumental documentarian of American history to ever live (the whole series is currently available on Netflix). With a total runtime topping 17 hours, split into 10 episodes, the show delves deep into the weeds of modern Vietnamese history and the thousand steps that, bit by bit, drew the US further into a tragic path enabled by a poisonous mix of ignorance and active obfuscation of the truth by those in power, a concerted propaganda effort that involved administrations from across the political spectrum.

               Earlier this month, on December 9^th, 2019, the Washington Post released a massive, 6-part series titled "The Afghanistan Papers." Based on a huge trove of newly-released documents, interviews, and testimonies from a huge swath of the policymakers and military figures who drove US policy in Afghanistan, up to and included Donald Rumsfeld himself, it lays bare the degree to which every facet of America's conduct of the war, up to the present day, has been built on a web of lies, ignorance, and institutional malaise on par with Vietnam. It's long been fashionable to refer to Iraq as "my generation's Vietnam," but, while that comparison remains bitterly fitting, the Afghanistan Papers make it painfully clear that Afghanistan has an equally strong claim to that uniquely American moniker.

               How lucky are we; we've so thoroughly failed as a society to learn a damn thing from our history that we are now saddled with the fallout of not just one, but two Vietnams. And, almost two decades on, neither of them are even over yet.

               Even before it ended, the Vietnam War stood as a frighteningly prescient example of what happened when the blind lead the blind, where the powerful on high are so far removed from the effects of their decisions that they are incapable of altering course, even when the magnitude of their failures becomes impossible to ignore. While the war effort continued to deteriorate, the governing institutions in Washington responded by simply locking down into systematic, pervasive patterns of deflection and denial. Those at the very top, especially Secretary of State Robert McNamara, couldn't hide the reality from themselves, but that didn't stop them from pulling every lever within reach to hide it from everyone else. Until, of course, the release of The Pentagon Papers, when the whole facade finally came crumbling down like a house of cards before a great wind.

               In a just, or at least moderately sane, society, the Afghanistan Papers would be every bit as much an earth-shattering scandal as the Pentagon Papers were. The Pentagon Papers were a seminal moment in American civic society, a breaking point that, for the first time in the modern era, pushed an especially large number of Americans (particularly White Americans) into a place of permanent distruct for the government and any related institutions of power, a fundamental attitude that continues to have ripple effects in our politics today.

               Sadly, they will not. They have already passed from the top of the Washington Posts' website and generated only limited coverage in other outlets. To a certain extent, with an active impeachment process going on and another climate conference having taken place around the same time, that is to be expected. But in other respects, it further reflects the tragic nature of the media environment we live in today, where the drumbeat of terrible news about terrible people doing awful things- which, obviously, includes Trump, but is in absolutely no way limited to him or even to the United States- is so overwhelming, so all-encompassing, that none of us have the time or strength to properly consider a single thing like this, no matter how severe and major a problem it may be.

               But the importance of such things is not entirely dependent on our attention spans, and with the increasingly global problems and conflicts that the current crisis are bound to spark, it is more essential than ever that as many of us as possible make the effort now to learn the lessons of the past that we didn't earlier. This includes the continuing military and humanitarian disasters in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, all of which mirror the many things that went wrong in Vietnam in too many ways to ignore.

               The Vietnam War was Murphy's Law in action, a cascading series of mistakes and misunderstanding and bad decisions, consistently made worse by bad faith efforts to keep as many people as possible in the dark about just how little the United States knew what it was doing in Vietnam and why. Burns' latest documentary carries many of his now legendary stylistic choices, like editing together video clips and moving photographs to draw the viewer into their stories and prevent them from feeling static or detached from us in the now. This, combined with the length of time he takes to ensure every facet of the story possible is worked in, including wide-ranging interviews with both American and Vietnamese people from every possible side of the conflict, gives this series crucial depth. To be fair, watching it requires commitment; the whole thing is long, often hard to watch, and has so many threads at once that it is very hard for the mind to wrap itself around it. Which makes it, effectively, a miniature taste of what the war itself was; a long, messy, vast thing that so many individuals ended up lost inside of forever.

               There are so many ways we can be better. There are so many ways we can do better. But we can't start with them until we find a way to end the wars we are still fighting now, so as to finally put at least a part of our history as a nation to rest. It is hard, bitter work, and I can't say I am optimistic we can pull it off. Yet, in the end, we really don't have a choice.

-Noah Franc

Previously on Films for the TrumpYears:

Part 1- Selma

Part 2- Good Night, and Good Luck

Part 3- 13^th

Part 4- Get Out

Part 5- Chasing Ice/Chasing Coral

Part 6- The Big Short

Part 7- Human Flow

Part 8- Winter's Bone/Moonlight

Part 9- Black Panther

Part 10- Arrested Development

Part 11- Bowling for Columbine

Part 12- [T]error

Part 13- Angels in America

Part 14- Do The Right Thing

Part 15- All The President's Men

Review: Frozen II

Frozen II (2019): Written by Jennifer Lee, directed by Jennifer Lee and Chris Buck. Starring: Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel, Josh Gad, and Jonathon Groff. Running Time: 103 minutes.

Rating: 3.5/4

               Bit by bit, the new wave are Animated Disney Princess Musicals are improving. Moana remains my personal favorite, but Frozen II is able to stick to its guns in a way the first movie wasn't able to pull off; I still consider the first half of Frozen to be very near perfect, but the drop-off following the dynamite "Let It Go" sequence is pretty steep. That, plus the long-running, legendary shitiness of nearly everything in the Disney sequel canon, made me very cautious entering Frozen II, even though the trailers certainly did make it look like the studio was putting real muscle into it this time.

               Thankfully, they did, and the result is a solid improvement over the first movie in every measurable way. It's been a few years since the last story ended, and the kingdom enjoys peace. Elsa, however, is growing restless, as a strange, ethereal voice coming from the North comes to her with increasing frequency. Her agitation and worry grows until, in a stunning flight-of-fancy sequence, she accidentally unleashes four long-dormant, elemental spirits, that begin to plague Arendelle to thoroughly that the entire place soon flees to the hills.

               Elsa knows that, whatever she did, her power is what is needed to set it right, sets off to the North with Anna, Kristoff, and Olaf. Their goal is the legendary Enchanted Forest, where, according to their father, a conflict between Arendelle and an indiginous tribe called the Northuldra so incensed the spirits that the forest was sealed away behind a magical fog.

               The journey that results is, as Olaf immediately points out, destined to change them all. Answers regarding Elsa's powers and purpose, the identities of the spirits, and the reasons why Arendelle and the Northuldra went to war await, as does a series of jarring reveals about Elsa's and Anna's parents and their lineage. In the side story, Kristoff has been planning to propose to Anna for some time, but can't seem to stop tripping over himself whenever he tries, and he struggles to reconcile his feelings of love with the rocky paths life keeps throwing in their way.

               As with the first movie, Elsa's ice powers provide a lot of ways to get creative with the animation, and the results are staggering. While the first film has now aged a bit, this one is filled with one stunning visual image after another. This is the sort of film that still shows off the power of seeing things on big screens, since the sheer grandeur of some of the films best moments will never be fully captured by a television screen.

               The songs, written once again by the Lopez duo, do not include another show-stopping "Let It Go," but in leui of one, mind-bending monster hit, the soundtrack has a much more complete and thorough feel to it. One of my criticisms of the first Frozen was that, while the first half was appreciatively filled with songs, a few of them felt distinctly different from the score, and by the film's end the songs were abandoned almost entirely (except for that damn troll song, which I still refuse to re-listen to). There is one notable example here, Kristoff's primary number "Lost in the Woods," but it's such a clear parody song and works so much better as "the comedy song" than anything in the first, that I can't hold that against it.

               The rest of the tracks have a much more fluid feel to them, constantly incorporated both the melody of the disembodied voice haunting Elsa and the refrain of a lullaby the two sisters recall from their childhood, a chilling melody that holds an important clue as to where the story is going. Idina Menzel gets two belty tunes ("Into The Unknown" and "Show Yourself"), but after reflecting on it, I think my favorite might be Anna's key number, "The Next Right Thing." It's a solid song that also serves as a huge character moment at the darkest part of the film, where she has every reason to believe that she's lost everything.

               Here, too, the recurring focus on two sisters, struggling to understand and grasp their histories while still adjusting and adapting their adult relationship to each other contains levels of maturity and wisdom that not too many Disney films manage to achieve. It's so rare to say something like this about a Disney film, especially since we are right in the middle of the Desolation of Disney Live Action Remakes, but it's pleasantly refreshing.

               Kristoff and Olaf are both relegated to comedy relief, as to be expected, but here too Kristoff gets some really profound scenes: he's not an egotist, and not plagued by toxic masculinity or easily hurt by Anna always being distracted with worries about her sister. He gets two particular lines that offer a really quiet, powerful example for any boys in the audience wondering how to become decent men in the 21^st-century.

               This is a fun, enjoyable film with a lot of good, important things to say. It doesn't take any major chances, but it is beautiful to look at and pleasant to the ears. For God's sake, watch this film and not the live-action remakes. Disney's animation department still has it, and they deserve our support way more.

-Noah Franc