Cover Story - 2015 Holiday Movie Preview

Hollywood’s heavy-hitters and light comedies offer alternatives to sprawling space fantasies

Over the holidays, Star Wars: The Force Awakens will draw most of the oxygen from movie theaters, and could conceivably make more than the rest of its competition combined. With a few exceptions, the other new releases offer counter programming with silly comedies or serious stories about adults grappling with real-world problems, instead of having space battles in a galaxy far, far away.

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? ? ESSAY? Star Wars: The Fans Awaken
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? ? REVIEWS?
? The Danish Girl
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Youth
? The Big Short
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Carol
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? PREVIEWS?
? Alvin & the Chipmunks: The Road
? Sisters
? Concussion
? Daddy’s Home
? The Hateful Eight
? Joy
? Point Break
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Star Wars: The Fans Awaken
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How the sci-fi franchise puts grassroots creativity into hyperdrive
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Read the full film review
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The day after Thanksgiving 2014 saw the release of the first teaser for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Consisting of seven enigmatic shots from the space opera’s seventh installment, the 90-second clip generated 58.2 million views on YouTube in its first week.
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By the end of last year’s Thanksgiving weekend, Star Wars fans had flooded the Internet with countless reactions to the trailer, including a shot-by-shot recreation in LEGO and a satirical special edition version with superfluous CGI additions. The response typifies how today’s culture consumers respond to big pop events, and no pop event is bigger than Star Wars.
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Since its debut in 1977, George Lucas’ tribute to vintage sci-fi serials has been so massively popular it’s been in a class by itself. The original Star Wars’ runaway success — adjusted for inflation, it’s the highest-grossing film of all time — led to a vogue for hugely expensive, special effects-heavy popcorn movies with deep merchandising streams. Hollywood’s appetite for pricey blockbusters like today’s superhero movies can be traced directly to Star Wars’ first episode, A New Hope. Many factors can account for its appeal, but they boil down to a story simple enough to be accessible to practically anyone, while set in a wholly imagined universe that feels fully lived in.
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Even though the prequel trilogy, beginning in 1999 with The Phantom Menace, received some scorching derision, it paradoxically made the brand even stronger and more ubiquitous. Unadjusted for inflation, The Phantom Menace is the highest-grossing of the six films to date. The trilogy inspired more spin-offs such as the Cartoon Network’s “Clone Wars” animated series and Star Wars became a more pervasive part of the cultural conversation than it was in the 1990s. (It’s reminiscent of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s line, “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”) Other beloved franchises such as Star Trek or The Lord of the Rings have challenged Star Wars’ hold on the collective imagination, but none matches its universal recognition or ability to inspire grassroots artistry.
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Star Wars’ creative energy partly comes from the longtime admirers of Luke Skywalker and company who now control its mass-media empire, first among them Force Awakens director/co-writer J.J. Abrams. With the latest chapter, Abrams is not only telling a single story, but also setting the tone for a new annual series of films that will continue as long as Jedi knights and droids make money. Given the record-setting level of The Force Awakens’ ticket sales, the only uncertainty is whether it’ll be one of the highest-grossing films of all time, or THE highest grossing film.
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Toys, novelizations, and other ancillary products tend to be seen as a big franchise’s bastard children, but some of Star Wars’ recent tie-ins have proved surprisingly worthwhile. Marvel Comics has a Darth Vader title that offers the best treatment of the iconic, heavy-breathing villain in more than 30 years. Tom Angleberger’s Young Adult Origami Yoda novels engagingly depict a group of middle schoolers who use origami puppets and Star Wars fandom to solve personal problems and challenge an oppressive educational system.
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The most interesting work takes place outside official channels. The Star Wars brand has always been tolerant of fan films, with the 1997 “Cops” parody “Troops,” which depicts Stormtroopers policing Luke’s home planet of Tattooine and effectively launched a niche subgenre.
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A knotty argument has evolved over whether Star Wars belongs to the fans or its creators. While the legal answer is obvious, the implications are a little more complicated. Following Lucas’ tinkering with the first trilogy’s special editions, purists have disseminated bootleg “despecialized editions” that restore original details. Fan edits of the prequels strive to countermand Lucas’ more ill-advised choices. Over the past 20 years, Lucas has fallen far in the estimation of Star Wars fans. When he sold Lucasfilm to Disney, he described his relationship to his films as akin to a painful divorce.
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The fascination with Star Wars has led to works that had no precedent. The daily podcast “Star Wars Minute” devotes each 15-30 minute episode to a single minute of one of the films. Hosts Pete Bonavita and Alex Robinson have made more than 400 episodes, already covering the first trilogy and recently starting The Phantom Menace. Their casual sense of humor about Star Wars and themselves makes the show surprisingly warm and charming.
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Star Wars Uncut demonstrates the fandom’s global reach. The shot-by-shot remake is produced, edited, and directed by Casey Pugh. In 15-second increments, fans recreate scenes using children, cats, sock puppets, and more. Winner of a 2010 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Media, the project feels like a collaborative home movie by thousands of Star Wars lovers around the world.
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Atlanta’s live monthly storytelling show Scene Missing did a Star Wars night, “The Force Atlantans,” on Dec. 16 at the Highland Inn Ballroom Lounge. Perhaps the weirdest project is “Star Wars Wars: All 6 Films at Once” by Atlanta’s Marcus Rosentrater. An animator for “Archer,” Rosentrater presented the six films running simultaneously as an online clip of more than two hours. Rosentrater brings different images forward in the visual cacophony, so you can, for instance, see interstellar dogfights in an actor’s close-up. It’s not something you can watch for long, but it makes a great background for a party.
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A trenchant commentary on the franchise came from a satirical version of The Force Awakens’ official poster. Riffing off John Carpenter’s science fiction film They Live, which posited that aliens live among us and control the populace with subliminal messages, Hal Hefner’s mash-up poster replaces the Force Awakens title with Consume the Merchandise and the credits with “Buy the toys. Buy the clothes. Buy the food.”
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The joke underlies a point worth making — that the vast majority of Star Wars-inspired fan creativity serves as pro bono marketing for the brand. There’s a fine line between Internet memes that spoof Harrison Ford’s grumpy attitude and TV commercials that use R2D2 or BB-8 to sell computers or other products.
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Present-day pop culture delivers such quick, creative responses to big cultural events that the event itself can seem almost superfluous. The mass familiarity with Star Wars can provide an engaged audience to aspiring artists, comedy writers, video editors, and more. But fan projects often just prop up big corporate products, and while fan art creators should have their fun, they should also remember the words of Admiral Ackbar: “It’s a trap!
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Most Star Wars-related memes, art pieces, and other creativity simply share enthusiasm with the films: Even the slams on Lucas seldom question the best of Star Wars as an overall enterprise. There’s a stubborn faith to the fandom that longs for a kind of pure Star Wars experience really only achieved by the first two films. Even when struck down, Star Wars adherents reliably look to the latest episode as a new hope.
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REVIEWS
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The Danish Girl (Dec. 25)
?★★★☆☆
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In this biographical film set in 1920s Denmark, Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne plays Einar Wegener, an acclaimed painter with a happy marriage to aspiring artist Gerda Wegener (Alicia Vikander). Necessity leads Einar to wear women’s clothes to replace one of Gerda’s models, and on a lark, he attends a fancy ball in drag, claiming to be cousin Lili. Gerda gradually learns that Einar considers Lili to be her true self, to the point that Lili pursues the world’s first gender reassignment surgery.
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The Danish Girl has been criticized for not casting a transgender performer as Einar/Lili, but Redmayne unquestionably gives a deeply felt performance. The character’s self-discovery is palpable. Redmayne seems more awkward and alien in Einar’s suits, growing increasingly comfortable and coquettish as Lili. Rather than simply present a cliché of a dutiful wife, Vikander more than holds her own, capturing Gerda’s love for her husband, her heartbreak, and her creative ambitions — Gerda has a hand in the transition.
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The King’s Speech director Tom Hooper helms an impeccably acted, well-intentioned biopic that plants itself in the contemporary conversation about transgender people while still feeling a few steps behind the times. The Danish Girl comes across as a Trans 101 kind of story, but Vikander and Redmayne create at least two unforgettable individuals.
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Youth (Dec. 18)
?★★★☆☆
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Paolo Sorrentino, Italian director of the 2014 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner The Great Beauty, feels like an heir to the classic art filmmakers of post-World War II Europe. In his second English-language film, Youth, Michael Caine stars as renowned retired conductor Fred Ballinger at a luxurious Swiss spa. Youth presents a kind of spa experience in its own right, being soothing, sensuous, and setting a leisurely pace.
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The loosely structured plot includes Fred’s daughter (Rachel Weisz) and her failing marriage; Fred’s filmmaker friend (Harvey Keitel) attempting to write a screenplay; and such spa guests as a Johnny Depp-esque movie star (Paul Dano) and the newly crowned Miss Universe (Madalina Diana Ghenea). With lush photography and a languorous tone, the film offers dreams, music performances, and strolls through countrysides. You don’t watch it so much as soak in it. The script occasionally strains in its efforts to make grand statements about love, sex, art, memory, and the aging process. But the whole of Youth is greater than the sum of its parts, leaving your soul feeling inexplicably refreshed.
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The Big Short (Dec. 23)
?★★★★☆
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A longtime director of silly Will Ferrell comedies, Adam McKay has long felt righteous indignation over the financial chicanery behind the 2008 economic crash. In The Big Short, Michael Lewis’ bestselling take on the disaster, McKay finds a vehicle for both his political anger and brash sense of humor.
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The Big Short follows several groups of outsider investors (including Christian Bale, Steve Carell, and Brad Pitt) who perceive the 2000s’ housing boom as a bubble about to burst. In an ingenious feat, The Big Short makes the audience root for the heroes as scrappy underdogs challenging the big banks’ risky business. With hindsight we know them to be correct, although they’ll only be proven right through economic catastrophe.
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It takes The Big Short a while to click, and its bids for deeper emotions — such as Carell’s character mourning a deceased brother — don’t mesh with the fast-paced satire. Replete with flashy editing and celebrity cameos that explain complicated financial instruments, The Big Short conveys that the big banks’ games were more rigged than even the cynics knew — and haven’t changed much since then.
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Carol (Dec. 25)
?★★★★☆
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A mood of dread comparable to film noir hangs over this tragic love story based on the novel The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith. Highsmith also authored The Talented Mr. Ripley and its sequels. Director Todd Haynes follows two women of different ages rebelling against male entitlement in 1950s New York. Well-off Carol (Cate Blanchett) seeks a divorce from her seething husband (Kyle Chandler), who’s willing to use any means to bring her to heel. Meanwhile, shopgirl Therese (Rooney Mara) bristles at the presumptions of the men in her life, who are superficially nice but disrespectful of her opinions.
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Carol and Therese grapple with such similar problems, and have such an electric attraction, that it’s no surprise that they should fall in love. Haynes sets such a steady pace that their emotional ties feel even stronger than their physical connection, and we grow enormously invested in their fate.
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Blanchett gives a wrenching performance as a woman torn between her personal desires and responsibilities as a mother, while Mara sensitively captures Therese’s inner life and slow self-actualization. Carol makes an excellent companion to the doomed romance of Haynes’ earlier film, Far From Heaven, with pertinent sexual politics supported by a powerhouse of an emotional core.
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PREVIEWS
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Alvin & the Chipmunks: The Road (Dec. 18)
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Can you believe they’ve made four Alvin and the Chipmunks movies?
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Sisters (Dec. 18)
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Former “Weekend Update” co-hosts and comedy pals Tina Fey and Amy Poehler play sisters who throw a huge party at their childhood home. This follow-up film from Jason Moore, director of the first Pitch Perfect, is based on a script by longtime “Saturday Night Live” writer Paula Pell and casts Poehler and Fey against type as a straight-laced divorcee and an impulsive hedonist, respectively.
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Concussion (Dec. 25)
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Will Smith makes a big push for a Best Actor Academy Award in this fact-based drama drawn from a 2009 GQ magazine exposé. Smith’s Nigerian-born pathologist performs a post-mortem on a former football great (David Morse), leading to research that professional football can cause catastrophic brain trauma, in direct contradiction of the NFL’s official stance. It co-stars Alec Baldwin, Albert Brooks, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw.
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Daddy’s Home (Dec. 25)
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Will Ferrell plays a responsible suburbanite eager to please his new stepkids, only to enter an escalating rivalry for affections with their cool, ne’er-do-well father (Mark Wahlberg). This reteaming of Ferrell and Wahlberg after The Wrong Guys comes from the director of That’s My Boy and Horrible Bosses 2.
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The Hateful Eight (Dec. 25)
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Partly in protest of Hollywood’s conversion from celluloid to digital filmmaking, Quentin Tarantino crafts a throwback to the big-screen epics of 50 years ago, only with modern-style violence and profane dialogue. A group of bounty hunters, criminals, and war veterans is reluctantly snowed in at a remote Wyoming outpost, including Tarantino veterans Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Tim Roth, and Michael Madsen, as well as Jennifer Jason Leigh in a ferocious comeback role. To be released on Christmas Day at theaters with 70 mm projectors (in Atlanta at Regal Atlantic Station and AMC Southpoint) in a special version with an overture and an intermission, then opening wide on Dec. 31.
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Joy (Dec. 25)
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America’s sweetheart Jennifer Lawrence has her third reunion with director David O. Russell following Oscar-nominated turns in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. The new film casts Lawrence in a quirky biopic based on the career of Joy Mangano, a struggling single mom with a demanding family who invented the Miracle Mop. Lawrence’s Playbook/Hustle co-star Bradley Coooper plays an executive with a passion for the QVC Network.
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Point Break (Dec. 25)
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A cult has grown around the original 1991 Patrick Swayze/Keanu Reeves action film, directed by Kathryn Bigelow. The remake finds FBI agent Johnny Utah (Luke Bracey) on the trail of a gang led by the charismatic Bodhi (Édgar Ramírez) that performs extreme sports-themed heists. Expect the plot of the first film reinvented for the Fast and the Furious era.
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