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Tuesday, April 4, 2017

April Film Club

It's April!  Let's hope the coldest days are behind us and all we have to endure is a whole lot of rain.  Down to business.  For the month of April I will be following the trend I started a few years ago, of just playing whatever I darn well feel like playing, no theme, no specific genre, just a movie that I love (It's my birthday month!).  So, for this year's April Film Club, we are going to be watching the newest addition to the Star Wars Universe, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

Rogue One is a 2016 American epic space opera film directed by Gareth Edwards and written by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy, based on a story by John Knoll and Gary Whitta.  It was produced by Lucasfilm and distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.  It is the first installment of the Star Wars Anthology series, set immediately before the events of the original Star Wars film.  The cast includes Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Riz Ahmed, Ben Mendelsohn, Donnie Yen, Mads Mikkelsen, Alan Tudyk, Jiang Wen and Forest Whitaker.  Rogue One follows a group of rebels on a mission to steal the plans for the Death Star, the Galactic Empire's superweapon.  Rogue One received generally positive reviews, with praise for its acting, action sequences, musical score and darker tone.  It received two Academy Award nominations for Best Sound Mixing and Best Visual Effects.  The film currently holds a certified fresh rating of 85% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Matt Zoller Seitz, writing for Rogerebert.com, gave the film 3 and a half stars out of 4, saying this in his review, "The film adds much-needed shading to the Rebel Alliance, which has both moderate and "militant" elements that don't trust each other and often work at cross-purpose.  The military leadership argues about whether it's better to be aggressive or cautious; the Imperial generals and bureaucrats debate tactics as well, and the question of whether it's better to ask forgiveness or permission comes up more than once.  This is the first entry in the saga that convinces us that its characters live in an actual civilization, with rules and traditions and a sense of history (and a religion) that they measure themselves against. ("The force moves darkly around a creature that's about to kill," one character informs another, anticipating a betrayal.)  Rogue One also gets into the question of whether it's morally acceptable to surrender or simply give up when you're too tired or broken to fight.  Its conclusions are more nuanced than you might expect.  The Force may be with you always, but there are times when its weight feels like too much to carry."

We will be meeting Thursday, April 20th at 6:15pm.
I hope you are able to come out and enjoy this film with us!

Here's the trailer: