The main takeaway from that two-day-old Wall Street Journal piece about the making of Solo: A Star Wars Story (Disney, 5.25) is that the Ron Howard-directed footage amounts to 70% of the final film.

Principal photography under original directors Chris Lord and Phil Miller began on or about 1.30.17, but it took Solo producer Kathy Kennedy and co-screenwriter and consigliere Lawrence Kasdan four and a half months to decide that they didn’t agree with L&M’s semi-comic approach (they were apparently going for something akin to Guardians of the Galaxy)? At the time of their dismissal Lord and Miller had nearly completed principal photography.

Kennedy wanted Howard to steer the project back to “the spirit of the original trilogy.” Howard began re-shooting in June 2017, and “had to direct almost the entire movie from scratch,” according to an 5.10 Indiewire summary of the WSJ article.

Posted 11 months ago, or on 6.21.17: “Why did producer Kathy Kennedy wait four and a half months to cut Lord and Miller loose? What does it say about Kennedy’s hiring instincts that she chose a couple of guys with whom she so disagreed that ‘she didn’t even like the way they folded their socks,’ according to Brent Lang‘s Variety story?

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Qualifier #1: Even from the fanboys, the consensus seems to be that Solo‘s first act is clunky and that it takes a while (what, 30 to 40 minutes?) to find its footing but once Donald Glover arrives and “the Kessel Run heist plot kicks in, it’s a whole lot of fun.” There’s also agreement that it takes a while to settle into Alden Ehrenreich‘s Han Solo (i.e., mini-Han) but that you just have to accept that the young-Harrison-Ford template is out the window and that Ehrenreich is playing Jake Gittes. Qualifier #2: All I’ve said from the get-go is that Ehrenreich is a bad fit for the part, but I’ve projected nothing at all about the film itself. Qualifier #3: I’m concerned that Bradford Young, Hollywood Elsewhere’s second-least favorite cinematographer for his tendency to make everything look slightly murky and covered in pea-soup, is Solo‘s dp.

Tonight’s big film is the highly regarded Birds of Passage, a Directors Fortnight entry showing at 10:30 pm. Directed by Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego, it’s about “the origins of the illegal drug trade in Colombia in the 1970s” as well as “a family story set within an indigenous community.”

Someone speculated earlier that I might avoid Gaspar Noe‘s Climax. Bullshit — I’ve never sidestepped an opportunity to see a Noe film, ever. Previously titled Psyche, Climax was allegedly “shot in just two weeks, and focuses on an urban dance troupe that embarks on a kind of Dionysian frenzy in an abandoned school.” (Wild Bunch’s Vincent Maraval has said this information is incorrect.) For years Noe has been promoting the idea of his being some kind of sensual Satanic figure. The effort continues.

A few hours ago I was forced to choose between the 11 am press conference for Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War or catch a Salle Bazin screening of Joe Penna‘s Arctic at the same hour. I chose the press conference. It was announced soon after that Bleecker Street has acquired U.S. and select international rights for Arctic.

From Owen Gleiberman’s Variety review: “Five years ago, All Is Lost premiered at Cannes to deserved acclaim. But when it opened later that fall, the film was a noteworthy commercial disappointment (it made just $6 million domestic), and the awards magic never happened for Robert Redford.

“I think I understood why. All Is Lost was ingeniously made, and a true experience, yet the stark fact is that it was slow. Arctic, as effective as it is, may face a similar challenge (at least in the U.S.), precisely because of the rough-hewn, trudging-through-the-tundra, one-step-at-a-time honesty with which Joe Penna works. The movie, in its indie way, is the anti-Cast Away. Yet that’s what’s good and, finally, moving about it. It lets survival look like the raw experience it is.”

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It was reported three days ago that the GOP-led House of Representatives had voted to kill guidance from a consumer protection agency aimed at preventing lenders from charging minority consumers more on car loans — obviously a discriminatory practice. Republicans don’t care, of course; they just want to diminish government regulations. All hail Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., for calling out those who would deny that discrimination takes place in this realm. “This resolution is one part of a widespread Republican effort to make it more difficult to hold financial institutions responsible,” said Waters.

Watch Congresswoman Maxine Waters rip a GOP Rep in half who interrupted her and was being racist: “I do not yield. Not one second to you. Not one second,” Waters said. This is how it’s done. We are done with their BS. No more. Not one second more. pic.twitter.com/vzHlTioSyN

— Scott Dworkin (@funder) May 11, 2018

“This is really a movie about chain of command, and about people diminished and decimated by authority. In this case you have a colonel who’s middle management, and with middle management you can look up or look down. And when you have a system without oversight, about power fortifying itself at the expense of the non-powerful, this is what you get.” — David Simon, creator, executive producer, head writer and show runner for all five seasons of The Wire (’02 to ’08). (Essay posted on 5.10.18.)

In a word, Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Cold War is brilliant — an impressively grim, beautifully shot, wonderfully concise portrait of a compulsively hot if constantly frustrating love affair. Romantic bindings can be fatiguing, turbulent, infuriating, painful or even destructive, but the fires are not easily quenched.

Right now Cold War is the leading candidate to win the Palme d’Or, hands down.

Set in ’50s-era Poland and France (mostly Warsaw and Paris) and spanning about a decade, it’s about a musician-arranger (Tomasz Kot) and a headstrong femme fatale singer (Joanna Kulig) who are drawn to each other but never quite come together or achieve even a semblance of stability, much less synchronicity.

Cold War director Pawel Pawlikowski, actress Joanne Kulig during this morning’s press conference — Friday, 5.11, 11:35 am.

Kot pursues, wins, then loses Kulig, over and over. But she keeps returning, affirming her love then changing her mind and ducking out the side door.

Pawlikowski employs the same glorious black-and-white palette and 1.37:1 aspect ratio that he used for Ida, and it’s just pure dessert, an ice-cream sundae — I was in boxy heaven.

And Cold War is only 84 minutes. I love it when a world-class director reminds us all that narrative discipline and pruning things down to essentials are still active options.

Heralded as a kind of African-cinema breakthrough, banned in Kenya for encouraging homosexuality and finally becoming the first Kenyan film accepted by the Cannes Film Festival, Rafiki is…well, pretty good. Set in low-rent Nairobi, it’s a nicely finessed lesbian love story that plays in familiar ways.

Wanuri Kahiu‘s second film is good and winning but in a mild (but not meh) sort of way. The lovers, Kena and Ziki (Samantha Mugatsia, Sheila Munyiva), are daughters of opposing political candidates, which obviously piles on the pressure. Kahiu’s decision to deal head-on with Kenyan homophobia and intolerance is understandable, but the result is that the first half loses its aura of intimacy and tenderness. The second half is a little too adamant and on-the-nose. There should have been one or two straight characters who don’t give the couple so much grief.

But I loved the two leads (especially Munyiva); ditto Kena’s mom (Muthoni Gathecha). And I loved getting to know native Nairobi culture to some extent.

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It began to drizzle before Thursday evening’s Salle Debussy screening of Sorry Angel. Most of the press people waiting to get in didn’t have umbrellas. Thankfully the rain didn’t intensify but if it had suddenly begun to rain cats and dogs, the Palais security guys never would’ve taken pity. They would’ve stood there and just watched as everyone got soaked. They stick to their schedules and never alter them, come hell or high water.

Set during the early ’80s Leningrad rock-music scene and focusing on a largely factual, less-than-ardent romantic triangle, Leto (Russian for summer) is a kind of monochrome dream trip — more about feeling the vibe than savoring the story. It’s something you need to sink into rather than judge and evaluate with a fine tooth comb.

Directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, Leto is based on the saga of three fact-based characters — Zoopark‘s Mike Naumenko (Roma Zver), his wife Natasha (Irina Starshenbaum) and Asian-born Viktor Tsoi (Teo Yoo), who went on to form Kino.

The screenplay is reportedly based on a memoir by Natalya Naumenko. (Natasha and Natalya are essentially the same name.)

It’s a trippy, at times rhapsodic recreation of the beginnings of Russia’s rock-music movement, a couple of years after the death of Leonid Breshnev and four or five years before Mikhail Gorbachev, the architect of glasnost and gradual liberal reforms within the Soviet Union, came to power.

Leto costars Roma Zver, Irina Starshenbaum during today’s 11 am press conference.

Leto kind of runs out of steam over the last 25 or 30 minutes and is therefore something of a mixed bag, but the first half to two-thirds are mesmerizing.

Anyone who expresses a “meh” reaction to Vladislav Opelyant‘s velvety black-and-white cinematography, framed within a lavish aspect ratio of 2.76 to 1 (the same as the nearly 60-year-old Ultra Panavision 70 or Camera 65 process), not to mention the monochrome hand-drawn animation used in the musical sequences…anyone who watches and says “aahh, no big deal, seen stuff like this before” really and truly has something wrong with them.

Call me a music-video rube but the musical sequences are electric and exhilarating and just great fun. Leto is definitely worth seeing for these alone.

Serebrennikov, an anti-Putinite, was arrested by government forces last August on trumped-up charges. He’ll apparently remain under house arrest until next fall, and was therefore unable to attend last night’s premiere or this morning’s press conference. The Leto costars held up a sign with his name on the red-carpet steps.

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As one who’s searched high and low for decent Times Square marquee photos, this full-color shot (from a reel of 8mm film) of the Astor marquee during the 1946 and ’47 run of The Best Years of Our Lives is one of the most striking I’ve ever come across. It’s not as dazzling as that color shot of Spellbound‘s Astor premiere on 10.31.45 [after the jump], but at least it’s in color.

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