Day: May 15, 2018

I saw Solo: A Star Wars Story (Disney, 5.25) earlier this evening at the Salle Debussy. A Han Solo origin story, and I really don’t give a damn about this heavily-milked realm. Same old “a long time ago,” same old dashing heroics, same old quips, same exotic creatures, same high-throttle chase scenes…formula, formula, plop-plop, fizz-fizz

How many years or decades does Disney plan on cranking out the same old sausage? The answer is “forever.” Six years ago Disney paid $4.6 billion to purchase the Star Wars universe, and that is the one and only reason you and your pallies are paying to see Solo the weekend after next. Because Disney wants the dough and because you’re a lemming, a zombie.

What did I get out of watching this light-hearted, fast-moving but rote-feeling Ron Howard flick, which attempts to reanimate the legend and spirit of Han Solo? HE regulars are sick of me saying that the rakish smuggler and adventurer has been personified by Harrison Ford for the last 42 years, but is now owned and operated by Alden Ehrenreich, whom I regard as “Little Han.”

The answer is “Not much, man…not much at all.”

Seriously, I never felt turned on or lifted up or caught up in the flow of the thing, and I’m saying this as someone who half-enjoyed The Force Awakens, felt mildly engaged by Rogue One and was half-taken by portions of The Last Jedi.

I just can’t respond to this stuff any more. I couldn’t take the plunge. I was muttering to myself “oh, Jesus, c’mon…they’re shovelling and recycling the same crap here, over and over and over.”

I’ve said this seventeen or eighteen times, but Ehrenreich is Han Solo’s shorter wannabe cousin — a guy who’s trying like hell to fill Han’s boots but who lacks fundamental Hannitude. And in this context, he really is part of Short People Nation. Shorter than Woody Harrelson, way shorter than Chewbecaa, not much taller than Emilia Clarke (who looks kind of odd in a chubby-faced way), and always looking up at everyone, like he’s some kid in seventh grade.

Yes, Ehrenreich does a good job of pretending to be a young Han, and if you want to go along with this charade, be my guest. AE gives it everything he has, applying the acting lessons he was given during principal photography, but the effort simply doesn’t work. There’s no escaping the fact that he’s nowhere close to being a chip off the old block.

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I’m not saying Lars von Trier‘s The House That Jack Built isn’t repellent in more ways than you can shake a stick at. It’s an odious, ice-cold exercise in homicidal perversity, and one for the record books at that. It should probably be avoided by anyone with a weak stomach or…oh, hell, by anyone who feels that films should exude some form of love or worship or celebration, which probably covers 99% of the moviegoing public.

But after last night’s build-up (tweets conveying disgust and rage, reports of people walking out of the black-tie premiere) I was expecting a diseased horror-murder tale so excessive that it might make me physically sick or prompt me to walk out or get into a fight with one of the security guys.

It didn’t do that. It turned out to be more of a meditative guilt confessional — about LVT more or less admitting that he may not be a good enough artist to deliver worthy, lasting art, and that all he really knows how to do is shock and agitate. (That’s what I got from it, at least.) I’m not saying it’s a better film than I expected, but it’s dryer and more meditative and not as heinous as I feared.

Portions of Jack are awful to sit through and the overall tone may be an equivalent to the professionally distanced, carefully maintained mindset of a psychological counselor in a hospital for the criminally insane. But for all the innate ugliness and sadistic cruelty on-screen, Von Trier is basically analyzing himself by way of Matt Dillon‘s Jack, a serial killer based in the Pacific Northwest, and casting a cold eye upon his shortcomings as a filmmaker.

Dillon is a would-be architect but is only gifted enough to be an engineer, he gradually admits. This is Von Trier talking about himself, of course — admitting to his audience that he’s “not quite Ivy League”, and that after shooting his wad on Breaking The Waves, The Idiots, Dancer in the Dark and Dogville that all he really knows how to do now is make shock-and-appall movies like this, Antichrist, the two Nymphomaniac films and so on.

I’m not saying Jack gets a pass, but at least LVT has tried to make it into something more thoughtful and meditative than just a series of clinical, cold-blood episodes showing recreations of this and that method of murder. It’s ugly and rancid, but about more than just that.

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