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Film Shorts: Valley Cinemas, Streaming, The Worx

Star Wars is – are? – coming to Glasgow. The long anticipated new Star Wars film, seventh in the series, and two years in the making, cost Disney a mere $4 billion – that's what they paid creator George Lucas to step away and take Jar-Jar Binks with him. Star Wars: The Force Awakens makes its debut at Valley Cinemas this Friday.

So what does a professional movie reviewer do the weekend before a new Star Wars appears? Watch the previous six in order, of course. This reviewer chose to watch the Lucas approved chronology, rather then the original release order. Not only was this prep work for the new film, but also a search for some meaning to the films deeper than "fun entertainment based on old sci-fi adventure serials from the '40s." I quickly realized that though I'd seen Star Wars Classic, as we now like to call it, many times back in the olden days, I'd only seen the other five once, when they came out. Thus I'd forgotten how childish Phantom Menace was – literally. The film seems geared to kids, with toilet humor (farts, "deep doodoo"), bad puns ("Exsqueeze me?) that a tot would spout. Perhaps Lucas was only really trying to sell toys. He certainly wasn't selling me on the trade route-senate stuff. Anakin Skywalker morphs into Hayden Christensen for the second film (the kid from the first film grew up to be a knife-wielding schizo), and must "fall in love" with Natalie Portman to the music of, "The closer I get to you, the worse it gets. The thought of not being with you - I can't breathe. I'm haunted by the kiss that you should never have given me. My heart is beating, hoping that kiss will not become a scar." As Harrison Ford told Lucas, "George, you can type this [bleep,] but you sure can't say it." But strangely, Christensen improves mightily in the third film, capturing the darkness that overcomes the character and turns him into one of the great screen villains. Not only did I get teary eyed at the end, but I concluded that Return of the Jedi might be the best of the series – a notion confirmed when Star Wars itself proved to be nicely streamlined, but rather clunky, with bad sound. If the first three were overproduced with too much big city busyness in the sky, SW feels cramped and rushed at times. The next two films were not directed by Lucas, and it shows. They wrap up the tale but like Lucas's precise flair for camera placement, editing, hand-held v. classic framing, and a surrealistic joy in the movement of color. If the first three movies are about mommy issues, the second trio is about daddy issues, but that's about as far as I got contemplating the place of Star Wars in the universe.

At the Glasgow City-County Library (408 3rd Ave S, 406, 228-2731) this week are the Julianne Moore editorial film about Alzheimer's, Still Alice, more "important" than it is skillful drama, and the 2008 bingable HBO miniseries, John Adams. What is it about America and dynasties? I thought we came over here to escape royalty and inherited position. Well, if we've got to have a dynastic family, one could do worse than the Adams family (the non-scary one), which produced senators, ambassadors, two presidents, and two of the country's greatest writers. With Paul Giamatti as John Adams and Laura Linney as the mouthy Abigail Adams, the characters also include Thomas Jefferson, Washington, Benjamin Franklin (Tom Wilkinson), Alexander Hamilton (Rufus Sewell) and John Hancock. Like most TV shows these days, it's too long at seven full hours, but it's informative, and might drive you back to the library to pick up some books by several of the Adamses or a Gore Vidal novel, such as Burr or 1876.

Coming to The Worx, at 700 1/2 1st Ave N (406-228-4474) is the excellent spy thriller Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, the fifth in the reboot of the TV show. Good stunts, mostly non-stop action, good acting, good jokes – not perfect, but a good entry in a top notch series.

Also on hand is the tedious part two of the unnecessary YA series adaptation, Maze Runner: The Scorch Trial. It's joined by the incomprehensible Fantastic Four, surely the worst so far of all the Marvel comic book adaptations. By its climax set in a rocky, foggy planet of the mind, FF ends up looking like a cheap Italian sci-fi film from 1966.

At least there is also Ted 2. If you have a taste for the humor of Seth MacFarlane – A Million Ways to Die in the West was both one of the funniest comedies of last year, and the smartest – then the second Ted will be balm at Xmas. Ted the miracle stuffed bear has to prove in court that he's a person, for "reasons." When not tending to the "plot" the characters are up to hijinks such as calling out sad inprov ideas at a comedy club.

 

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