Like Crazy

I can’t imagine how young people meet each other and fall in love in our modern world fragmented by technology. For all of the promise that things like Facebook and smart phones were supposed to make it easier to connect with others all over the world, they actually do just as good of a job keeping us physically apart. You can check up on a potential love interest by studying their FB page, Twitter feed and Instagram page all before meeting them in person and all of which can be nothing more than a carefully created persona that doesn’t represent the actual person. When people get tired of being in a relationship they can break things off with a text message or a tweet. How is this affecting the young people of today?

Filmmaker Drake Doremus addresses many of these notions with his bittersweet long-distance romance Like Crazy (2011), an independent film he shot on a still digital camera for $250,000. The end result is an emotionally affecting on again/off again romance between two people that can’t seem to let each other go despite all of the obstacles in their path depicted in authentically intimate fashion so that you really feel like you’ve gotten to know these people over the course of the film.

British exchange student Anna Gardner (Felicity Jones) and American student Jacob Helm (Anton Yelchin) meet at a college class they have together in Los Angeles. One day, after class, she leaves a handwritten note on his car. Impressed that she took the time and effort to write him a letter, he calls her and they meet for coffee. Their initial meeting is fused with the awkwardness of a first date, hoping you’ll say the right things and don’t act like an idiot. They broach the usual topics, like what they’re majoring in – journalism for her, furniture design for him – and their plans after school. There are self-conscious, pregnant pauses punctured by humor that is typical of a first date, but the way they look at each other you can tell there’s definitely a spark of attraction.

Anna and Jacob go back to her place where they stay up all night talking, bonding over their mutual love for Paul Simon’s music and he gets her to read some of her writing. At the end of the night, she sees him off and the silent yet intense looks they give each other tell us that these people are falling in love. Sure enough, we get one of those standard happy couples montages as we see them hanging out and getting close but done in a tastefully understated way. I like that they give each other very personal gifts – he makes his first ever chair for her and she gives him a book that chronicles their relationship through a combination of words and pictures.

Jacob meets Anna’s parents – Bernard (Oliver Muirhead) and Jackie (Alex Kingston) in an amusing scene over dinner where her mother is delightfully frank while her father is more diplomatic. Oliver Muirhead and Alex Kingston do an excellent job of quickly conveying two people that have been married for years by the way they play off each other and know how to embarrass their daughter. Naturally, the initial glow of Anna and Jacob’s budding romance becomes overshadowed by the looming expiration date of her student visa. It’s the cold splash of reality on their whirlwind romance.

Anna and Jacob throw caution to the wind and let their emotions govern their actions when she decides to stay the summer after her visa expires. When she goes back home for a family function and then tries to return to the United States she is detained by immigration and not allowed in. The rest of Like Crazy plays out how this decision affects their relationship, which they try to maintain over long distance.

Anton Yelchin brings a wonderful low-key quality to Jacob complete with a dry sense of humor that he uses to defuse a tense situation between him and Anna in a scene where, upset that she has to leave soon, buries herself in a book until he finally cracks her up by saying he once rescued a cat from a tree. Jacob is definitely the quieter of the two but that doesn’t mean he feels things as intensely as Anna does and Yelchin conveys that in his body language and facial expressions.

Prior to Like Crazy, the only thing I had seen Felicity Jones in was Rogue One (2016) where she plays a tough resistance fighter. In this film, she plays a much more complex character with a wide range of emotions. There’s a superb moment where, back home, Anna goes out with some friends and is chatting with a guy about the usual small talk and then during a brief lull in the conversation she goes silent and adopts a far away look as she is obviously thinking about Jacob that Jones conveys so well. Anna is often ruled by her emotions and one gets the feeling that she is never able to let go of her feelings for Jacob, that her love for him has impacted her profoundly. With Anna, Jones has created a fully realized character that has virtues and flaws just like anybody else.

It goes without saying that with a film like this the chemistry between the two leads has to feel genuine or it won’t work. Fortunately, Yelchin and Jones have fantastic chemistry together and make for a believable couple. They do an exceptional job of depicting the emotional arc of their relationship, from the first blush of romance to the uncertainty of their future together. It is a testimony to Yelchin and Jones’ skills as actors that they get us to care about Jacob and Anna and we become invested in their relationship, rooting for them to make it work – even when they get involved with perfectly nice people in an attempt to move on with their respective lives. I like that Doremus doesn’t try to villainize the significant others of Anna and Jacob. Samantha (Jennifer Lawrence) and Simon (Charlie Bewley) are perfectly nice people in their own right but no matter how much they try to make it work they aren’t right for Anna and Jacob.

Drake Doremus realistically depicts the highs and lows of long distance relationships like someone who has experienced it himself. For example, she conveys how painful it is to spend chunks of time together only to have to go back home when all you want to do is spend every minute with the other person. He nails the heart-wrenching experience of seeing off a loved one at the airport and the euphoria of seeing them arrive. He also nails the frustration of dealing with government bureaucratic red tape that is sometimes necessary to be with someone from another country. It is a powerless feeling as you are at the mercy of some faceless government official that doesn’t care about your situation. Doremus also isn’t afraid to show the stupid decisions people make along the way and how that impacts a relationship.

There are some people in life that just get you. There’s no explaining it and you have to hold on to those people because they are rare in this world. I believe that’s why Anna and Jacob keep getting back together. They connected on a deeply profound level that no amount of geographic distance or achievements in their professional lives could touch. Doremus gets it and depicts it with unflinching honesty. He has made a deeply personal film that is also relatable as he is dealing with basic emotions and feelings that most of us have experienced in our lives.

Like Crazy is all about the messiness of life, right down to the intentionally ambiguous ending that serves as a litmus test for the viewer, leaving it up to them to continue the story in their imagination if they like. Ultimately, people that really love each other find a way to make it work. It takes effort and commitment but it is possible and this film shows two people figuring it out as they go along, making mistakes and hopefully learning from them, but not losing sight of what they mean to each other.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

It finally happened. The Star Wars franchise released its first ever, non-chapter offshoot movie, the first in a planned anthology series. In this day and age, where all the studios in Hollywood now follow Marvel’s lead by trying to build their own lucrative franchises complete with interlocking movies, Lucasfilm have followed up the wildly successful Star Wars: Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015) with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), which is essentially a prequel to Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope (1977). If you recall, at the beginning of that movie, Princess Leia gave R2-D2 the stolen plans to the Death Star in the hopes that Obi-Wan Kenobi would get and take them to the Rebellion. Rogue One chronicles how these plans were stolen in the first place. Is this movie a simple cash-grab and a really expensive piece of fan fiction or does it stand on its own merits that justify its existence?

As a child, Jyn Erso witnessed her mother (Valene Kane) killed on orders from Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), an Imperial Military officer that “persuades” her father, Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), to continue his work on the Death Star, a massive space station capable of destroying entire planets. Jyn (Felicity Jones) grows up with an understandable hatred for the Empire. This makes her an obvious recruit for the Rebellion but initially she’s not interested, even after they rescue her from an Imperial prison.

They soon offer her a deal: accompany intelligence officer Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) to a planet called Jedha where renegade Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker) is holding a captive Imperial cargo pilot by the name of Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed) sent by Jyn’s father. Andor assembles a rag-tag group to undertake a mission with impossible odds a la The Dirty Dozen (1967), among them Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen), a blind warrior, and his best friend Baze Malbus (Jiang Wen), a Rebel warrior and mercenary. They are introduced in an impressively staged sequence where Imwe single-handedly takes out a platoon of Imperial Stormtroopers with only a staff.

Right from the get-go, Rogue One establishes a decidedly dark tone with the murder of Jyn’s mother and then the tense mood on the Imperial-occupied Jedha that boils over when Saw’s warriors attack an Imperial blockade in a busy city area. Most significantly, there’s the apocalyptic image of a Jedha city obliterated by a test blast from the Death Star. This is a war movie with plenty of casualties and a grim tone to match. That’s not to say there aren’t moments of levity, like the give and take between Imwe and Malbus (these guys need their own movie), and the sarcastic retorts from K-2S0 (Alan Tudyk), an Imperial enforcer droid that has been reprogrammed by Andor.

The cast is uniformly excellent with Felicity Jones and Diego Luna as particularly memorable leads. Fresh from her Academy Award nominated turn in The Theory of Everything (2014), she shows an impressive versatility as a rugged fighter but with a touching vulnerability when it comes to her father. Jyn joins the ranks of strong female characters in the Star Wars universe. Luna matches her as the Rebellion fighter with a checkered past that is only hinted at but it clearly motivates his actions. The actor does an excellent job at conveying this in his performance.

Other notable performances include veteran martial artist Donnie Yen as a blind, quasi Jedi and Alan Tudyk as a pessimistic droid. The former instills the movie with tantalizing references to the Force while the latter makes C3P0 seem positively cheerful in comparison. Character actor extraordinaire Ben Mendelsohn is quite strong as the Imperial officer in charge of the Death Star and gets some meaty scenes involving his character navigating the treacherous waters of Imperial politics that provide fascinating insight into the bureaucratic machinations of the Empire.

The attention to period detail is fantastic as the uniforms for both Rebels and the Empire are faithfully recreated as are their various vehicles, from X-Wings to Star Destroyers while also incorporating ones we haven’t seen before. This ensures that Rogue One fits seamlessly with the Original Trilogy movies. This isn’t done as merely an exercise in nostalgia – although, fans of those movies will have fun spotting the occasional Easter egg here and there, but actually incorporated into the very fabric of the story.

My good friend and fellow writer Noah Chinn argued in his review for Rogue One that there is a “tonal mismatch” that creates a jarring effect when compared to the rest of franchise. He points out that in the other movies there was always a glimmer hope. Even with its darkest installment, Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005), there was hope at the end – not so much with Rogue One, which ends on a nihilistic bummer. I didn’t have a problem with this – as an adult, which is Noah’s point. But what if I saw it as a child? Would have it emotionally scarred me? That being said, at the risk of sounding like an old fart, kids these days are coddled too much and the ending of Rogue One teaches them the power of self-sacrifice, of giving everything you have for something you believe in. Judging by the box office receipts of this movie, audiences don’t seem to have a problem with the dark tone of the movie either. Perhaps Rogue One is simply reflecting the times in which we live in and people are responding to it.

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It is a testimony to how involved I became in these characters and their story, even though I ultimately know what happens – the Death Star is destroyed – I didn’t know what happened to the characters I had never seen before, that I became invested in their respective fates. Rogue One is a much darker, dare I say, nihilistic movie than any of the other ones in the Star Wars franchise. It is also one of the best. I can’t imagine it being made under Lucas’ watch, which may upset purists, but now freed of his control it has allowed the new brain-trust to make bold moves and if this movie is any indication of what is in store for future standalone movies, fans are in for a real treat.