I’m doing a phoner tomorrow with Oliver Hirschbiegel about his latest film, 13 Minutes, which is about a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Naturally I’ll have to ask if he’s accepted the likelihood that his greatest claim to fame will be that Hitler rant scene in Downfall, which has given birth to hundreds upon hundreds of YouTube parodies. There may be as many as 1500 variations out there. I’m sorry but I’ve never seen this 2012 interview with Bruno Ganz before. He’s not happy about the parodies but he has no choice but to graciously accept them. His pained expressions are hilarious.

My head began to throb as I watched an extended Cinemacon product reel for Nikolaj Arcel‘s The Dark Tower (Sony/Columbia, 8.4). I was going to say “there’s nothing more boring than battles between absolute good and evil,” but then I remembered Shane (’53), which is almost a black-and-white thing. But not quite as it acknowledges, like any decently written story, that we all have our reasons. Even Donald Trump, the most flagrant manifestation of evil this side of ISIS, has a motive or rationale of some kind.

This Cosby juror, 21 year-old Bobby Dugan, said this morning on Good Morning, America that while he personally believed Cosby was guilty, the jury’s deliberations became about “he said, she said…what it really comes down to is who you gonna believe more? That’s all it was.” In other words, the two holdouts on the jury believed Bill Cosby‘s version rather than Andrea Constand‘s. Insufficient evidence, he says, but c’mon. The jurors who bought Cosby’s version almost certainly did so out of pre-trial allegiance or favoritism, or — to put it more simply — denial.

Andrew Jay Cohen‘s The House, a Will Ferrell-Amy Poehler comedy about 40ish marrieds running an illegal casino to pay for their daughter’s college costs, opens this Friday (6.30). A Canadian critic friend reports that Warner Bros. has “cancelled” plans for critic screenings, and wants to know if it’s being hidden from U.S. critics as well. I haven’t received an invite to a Los Angeles all-media screening, but I often have to ask to be invited to lowest-common-denominator studio flicks. If anyone knows anything, please advise.

A 6.23 interview with Clint Eastwood in the Carmel Pine Cone, written by Paul Miller, says that Eastwood’s next film, The 15:17 to Paris, will begin filming in August and will “probably be released later this year.” Which indicates a likely December release date. So we may have an Eastwood film in the 2017 Oscar derby, and one sure to be embraced by the same red-state audiences who went apeshit over American Sniper.

Based on “The 15:17 to Paris: The True Story of a Terrorist, a Train, and Three American Heroes,” a 2016 book by Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, Spencer Stone and Jeffrey E. Stern, which recounts a true-life episode in which three young guys, one of them a U.S. Air Force enlisted man, stopped an armed terrorist from murdering God-knows-how-many-passengers aboard a Brussels-to-Paris train.

The incident happened in August 2015 — the book popped twelve months later.

Miller excerpt: “At his office on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, Eastwood is busy these days refining the shooting schedule, while his casting directors are choosing the actors, costumers are picking the outfits, and set designers are planning the shots — all routine tasks for a major Hollywood picture.

From Kim Masters’ 6.26 Hollywood Reporter story about the ongoing Han Solo calamity (“Star Wars Firing Reveals a Disturbance in the Franchise“): “Matters were coming to a head in May as the production moved from London to the Canary Islands. Lucasfilm replaced editor Chris Dickens (Macbeth) with Oscar-winner Pietro Scalia, a veteran of Ridley Scott films including Alien: Covenant and The Martian. And, not entirely satisfied with the performance that the directors were eliciting from Rules Don’t Apply star Alden Ehrenreich, Lucasfilm decided to bring in an acting coach. (Hiring a coach is not unusual; hiring one that late in production is.) Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller suggested writer-director Maggie Kiley, who had worked with them on 21 Jump Street.”

Alden Ehrenreich, the anti-Han Solo.

Did I just read this?

Han Solo producer Kathy Kennedy and her creative consigliere, Lawrence Kasdan, could have chosen anyone to play the brave, reckless, somewhat rascally commander of the Millenium Falcon. How many name-brand 20something actors could have easily slipped into the role, guys with the natural insouciance and underlying gravitas of a young Harrison Ford? More than a few, I’m imagining. They had to choose a guy who could be at least faintly believable as a young Ford, which would have meant conveying a certain Hanitude — a mixture of Anglo Saxon cock-of-the-walk confidence, selfish mercenary cunning and shoulder-shrugging heroism.

And yet they chose a mopey, modestly proportioned, beady-eyed guy with the air of a rabbinical student — Alden Ehrenreich. Say hello, Star Wars fans, to the new Solo — a seemingly joyless, small-shouldered guy who lacks a sense of physical dominance (Aldenreich is five inches shorter than the 6’2″ Ford) and whose stock-in-trade is a kind of glum, screwed-down seriousness. A perfect candidate to play a solemn neurotic in one of Woody Allen‘s New York-based dramedies, but as Han Solo, not so much.

You’ll never guess what happened next. After three-plus months of shooting (early February to early May) or more than halfway through principal, it dawned upon Kennedy and Kasdan that Ehrenreich wasn’t working out like they’d hoped. They were presumably expecting that he’d shed his naturally morose manner and magically morph into a devil-may-care adventurer, but, to Kennedy and Kasdan’s astonishment, this didn’t happen.

“I really don’t get it,” Kasdan might have said to Kennedy. “There was absolutely no reason to presume that a frowning Jewish downhead couldn’t easily assume the manner and moxie of a grinning frat-boy scoundrel type.” To which Kennedy might have responded, “Yes, Larry, I know…it’s quite puzzling.” And so, at the suggestion of Han Solo directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, they hired an indie-level female director to try and…what? Instruct Ehrenreich on the basics of big-screen machismo? Teach him a few Harrison Ford mannerisms?