If, as the head of Lucasfilm marketing, I’d been recently ordered to come up with a title for Ron Howard, Kathy Kennedy, Phil Lord and Chris Miller‘s Han Solo film, I would have left work early on Friday. The idea would have been to withdraw from the hurly burly and think long and hard. I would make myself a pot of green tea, shut off all electronic devices, put on a Japanese robe and sandals and take long walks through the woods and along the beach.

“What to call it?,” I would ask myself over and over. “Yes, a three-year-old would have suggested Solo, and yes, I understand how the simplest approach can sometimes be the best one. But I wouldn’t want to adopt a lazy attitude. I’d want the title to be a pure and poetically perfect distillation of the Han Solo mythology.”

The answer might have hit me immediately or it might have taken all weekend, but by Sunday night my decision would be firm — Solo: A Stars Wars Tale.

Posted on 6.21.17: “The main problem with the Han Solo flick is Alden Ehrenreich playing the lead role. I explained my reservations in a 5.22.17 piece called ‘Ehrenreich Won’t Cut Han Solo Mustard‘:

“It was my reaction to Alden Ehrenreich‘s performance in Alexandre Moors‘ The Yellow Birds, which I saw at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, that convinced me he won’t be a good Solo. Aldenriech just doesn’t have that presence, that Harrison Ford cock-of-the-walk cool. There’s just something about Ehrenreich that feels guarded and clenched.”

Posted on 1.22.17: “Where In The Valley of Elah had the great Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron butting heads while looking into the stateside death of Jones’ son, The Yellow Birds mostly just wades into the frosty expressions and general lethargy of Ehrenreich’s Bartie — a guy I had zero interest in and didn’t want to hang out with.

“The reason is Ehrenreich himself. He simply lacks that X-factor magnetism that popular lead actors all have. Charming as he was in Hail Caesar!, this beady-eyed fellow doesn’t have ‘it’ — he’s always wearing the same sullen, hiding-out, stone-faced expression, no matter what kind of situation or character he’s playing. He never lifted off the ground or stepped out of bounds in Rules Don’t Apply. I’ll be seriously surprised if he turns out to be a great Han Solo as that Harrison Ford sexy-rogue quality just isn’t in him.”

“In defense of his claim that President Barack Obama didn’t call the loved ones of fallen soldiers, President Trump told Fox News Radio today that reporters [should] ask his chief of staff, retired Gen. John Kelly, whether Obama called him after his son Robert died in Afghanistan in 2010.

“Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, was a lieutenant general at the time.

“‘As far as other presidents, I don’t know, you could ask Gen. Kelly, did he get a call from Obama? I don’t know what Obama’s policy was,’ Trump said.” — from CNN report, filed today at 9:56 am Pacific.

We’re all here together on the same planet, sharing space and trying to be kind and maybe make some things happen. Nobody’s better or worse than anyone else, but it’s not unfair to explore the overall with a sudden-death calculus. If Harvey Weinstein were to die in a plane crash today, some might argue that the world would be a slightly better place. If Kyle Buchanan, Kris Tapley or Scott Feinberg‘s luck were to suddenly run out, the film industry would be a less quantifiable place. If Oliver Stone or Paul Schrader were to fall off a 200-foot cliff, film culture would suddenly have less wit and dimension. If Saoirse Ronan were to get hit by a bus, we’d all be short a Best Actress contender. If Irving the plumber catches a stray bullet, a lot of sinks, bathtubs and toilets wouldn’t function as well. But if Kris Jenner, Kourtney Kardashian, Kim Kardashian, Khloe Kardashian, Kendall Jenner and Kylie Jenner were to die in a plane crash tomorrow, in what way would the world suddenly be a lesser place? Be honest.

If you’re any kind of cinema hound the crisp, super-detailed capturings from 35mm big-studio films of the classic era should at least give you a semi-stiffie. If they don’t then what can I say? There’s something missing inside you, and there’s no medicine or special diet or surgery than can fix this. And I’m no fan of Sergeant York, mind. Even when I was a kid I found it dreary and sanctimonious, excepting that one portion when Gary Cooper kills several German soldiers and single-handedly captures over 100 of them, etc. But I love the cinematography by Sol Polito, whose other credits include Archie Mayo‘s The Petrified Forest and a slew of Michael Curtiz films including The Adventures of Robin Hood, Angels With Dirty Faces, The Sea Hawk and Captains of the Clouds (Academy Award for Best Color Cinematography) plus Irving Rapper‘s Now, Voyager and Frank Capra‘s Arsenic and Old Lace. A new Bluray is available in the European PAL format, but nothing for NTSC viewers.

Jimmy Kimmel: “I want everyone with a television to watch the show. But if [right-wing assholes are] so turned off by my opinion on health care and gun violence then I don’t know, I probably wouldn’t want to have a conversation with them anyway. Not good riddance, but riddance.”

I flinched when Tracy Smith asked Kimmel if he “deserve[s] to be here now.” Bad guys deserve the bad stuff that happens to them — I get that equation — but I’ve never understood how this or that person “deserves” happiness or great success or a pleasant fate. You can work your ass off and pour your heart into your scheme or career or whatever, but that doesn’t necessarily mean shit in the end. You might deserve to be happy, but that’s no guarantee of anything. You can have one or two things going for you, but there can be five or six things going on beneath that can take you down or stop your train. I’m basically saying that “deserve” is not a word that attuned people should use. It means nothing. I certainly never use it.

Where did I read an observation about the odd-couple pairing of Donald Trump and Mike Pence that compared Trump to the Rat Pack-era Dean Martin and Pence to Hugh Beaumont‘s Ward Cleaver in Leave It To Beaver? While I work on running that down, consider the following from Jane Mayer‘s 10.23 New Yorker piece, “The Danger of President Pence”:

Two gay deserters are standing in front of Mike Pence‘s Tom Dunson in a climactic scene from Red River. Gay guy #1: “Why doncha get your Bible and read over us after you shoot us?” Pence (smug, sneering): “I’m gonna hang ya.” Montgomery Clift (as the closeted Matthew Garth): “No, no you’re not. You’re not gonna hang those men.” Pence: “Who’ll stop me?” Clift: “I will.”

Fandor has posted a video about Chris Nolan‘s favorite films, or those “which may have helped shape his unique directorial sensibility.” 2001: A Space Odyssey (fine), Koyaanisqatsi (potrzebie), The Thin Red Line (“Malick’s portrayal of mental states and memory”) and….wait, Lewis Gilbert‘s The Spy Who Loved Me? Nolan quote: “At a certain point the Bond films fixed in my head as a great example of scope and scale in large scale images.”

Maybe, but The Spy Who Loved Me was the first Bond film to (a) embrace flagrant fakeness, (b) an ironic air-quote attitude and (c) a kind of japey, self-mocking comedic tone. Goldfinger was the first Bond film to pass along a self-amused, partially self-satirizing approach to rugged secret-agent machismo — The Spy Who Loved Me was the first to look the audience in the eye and say, “You may have gathered or deduced that we were having fun with 007 before. Well, from here on we have absolutely no genuine investment in the classic Ian Fleming James Bond realm — it’s all a fucking joke.”

When has Chris Nolan ever come within 1000 miles of Gilbert’s sensibility in anything he’s ever directed?

Christopher Nolan shares his favorite films. #MondayMotivation pic.twitter.com/8NnjUMQqOV

— Fandor (@Fandor) October 16, 2017

“Ya home?…my son, this is your time…we own ya…I waited my entire life for this…the world’s gonna start over…what happens now?…the revolution will be live,” etc. Speaking as a dedicated hater of superhero films, as a sworn enemy of the DC/Marvel universes (except for Ant-Man and the first two Captain America films and maybe one or two others), I half-regret acknowledging that Black Panther feels like some kind of rejuvenation, and that even I feel revved about it. This isn’t just a superhero flick — it’s a major rattling of the Mike Pence cage. Yo bumblefucks…we own ya. Fred Hampton lives.

If you want a simian type with a look of beady-eyed menace….a guy who smokes and glares and wolfs his food and pounds the table…a lowlife with nothing on his mind except finding new ways to communicate the greasy, slimey, low-life mentality of a muscular, high-testosterone thug….Jon Bernthal is your man. Best known for portraying Shane Walsh in AMC’s The Walking Dead and for stand-out roles in Fury, The Wolf of Wall Street, Sicario, The Accountant, Baby Driver and Wind River. He will never, ever portray a nice suburban guy who’s been to college. Or a guy with a mellow attitude. He’ll never play a mild-mannered employee of an ad agency or a real-estate company, or a guy who teaches grade-school kids or works at a small-town hardware store. The man is a predator, an animal — he spits and slurps and chews food with his mouth half-open.  He only conveys animal vibes.

If you leave aside the horrid issue of sexual assault and focus solely on matters of taste and aspiration, it is entirely fair to describe Bob Weinstein as a bottom feeder and Harvey, for all his detestable private behavior, as a guy who at least understood and respected smarthouse cinema. But not Bob. In their heyday Bob was Irwin Yablans to Harvey’s Frank Yablans. Bob has never given a shit about quality — he’s an exploitation guy who just wants to sell tickets.

So when I read yesterday that Bob is bumping Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s The Current War into 2018, I knew it was tantamount to a burial. It wouldn’t have done well commercially anyway, but now it’s “a cat in a bag with the bag in a river,” as Sidney Falco might’ve said.

And that’s really too bad. The Current War is weird and slow but an interesting film, and a highly unusual and eccentric one by visual standards alone. It’s a cerebral, vaguely boring Terrence Malick thing mixed with How The West Was Won. Every scene, line and frame tells you it was made by talented, forward-thinking cool cats trying to be different and distinctive, and now it’s probably going to be thrown into the bin. A shame.

My Toronto Film Festival review: Thomas Gomez-Rejon’s The Current War (Weinstein, 11.24) is an eccentric, visually unconventional period drama — that much is certain. 

The movie is basically an AC/DC thing — the battle between direct vs. alternating currents of electricity in the late 1880s and early 1890s, or a stab at creating compelling drama out of a battle of opposing modes and strategies for providing electricity to the public. 

This in itself, especially in an era of increasingly downscale if not submental approaches to mass entertainment, is highly eccentric. But the tone of inspirational strangeness doesn’t end there.

The DC team was led by genius inventor Thomas A. Edison (Benedict Cumberbatch) while the AC approach was steamrolled by engineer-businessman George Westinghouse (Michael Shannon) with a late-inning assist from genius Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla (Nicholas Hoult).

This is fine as far as histrionic line readings, personality conflicts and eccentric facial-hair appearances are concerned, but an especially striking visual style from South Korean dp Chung Hoon-Chung (It, The Handmaiden, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl) compounds the fascination.

In an attempt to reflect the unusual, headstrong mentalities of Edison and Westinghouse, Gomez-Rejon and Chung have gone with a kind of early ‘60s Cinerama approach to visual composition — widescreen images, wide-angle lenses and a frequent decision to avoid conventional close-ups and medium shots in favor of what has to be called striking if not bizarre avant-garde framings in which the actors are presented as smallish figures against dynamically broad images and vast painterly landscapes.

The look of The Current War, in short, closely resembles the extreme wide-angle compositions in 1962’s How The West Was Won.

I usually have a quibble or two with any Kyle Buchanan Oscar Futures column, but I’m almost 100% on board with his latest, which is mainly an expression of profound disappointment with Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel. I do, however, believe that Kate Winslet will snag the fifth Best Actress nomination slot. Winning is out of the question — it’s a McDormand vs. Ronan vs. Streep thing with Sally Hawkins snagging slot #4. Battle of the Sexes‘ Emma Stone is not happening.