Solo (2018)

Solo (2018): written by Jonathan and Lawrence Kasdan; directed by Ron Howard; starring Alden Ehrenreich (Han Solo), Woody Harrelson (Old Muley), Donald Glover (Lando Calrissian), British Comic Who Sounds Like Tilda Swinton (Sexy Droid), Emilia Clarke (Space Mafia Princess), Paul Bettany (Annoying English Guy), and Thandie Newton (I'm Not Doing six months of reshoots!):

Solo... A Star Wars Story... hmm. Spoilers ahoy!

1) The movie tells but doesn't show Solo as a young street punk on Corellia, making one wonder if an opening montage establishing this was left on the cutting-room floor some time during the process of scrubbing all of Phil Lord and Chris Miller's influence from the movie and reshooting 70% of the movie.

2) Boy, the first 20 minutes on Corellia are clunky and boring.

3) Hyperfuel/Coaxium. After fuel wasn't mentioned in 40 years of Star Wars movies, suddenly it's a major plot point in The Last Jedi. Now, fuel gets mentioned in the opening "scroll" (OK, it wasn't a scroll) and becomes the driving force of the plot. It sort of feels like the creators were backfilling the role of fuel in the Star Wars universe so that some day, when someone watches these things in chronological narrative order, Solo will have set up The Last Jedi. That's retroactive continuity!

4) Ditto for Han Solo's golden dice. As an original viewer of Star Wars, I don't even remember the dice. I mean, I assume they're hanging from the Millennium Falcon's rear-view mirror, but nope... no memory. Now they get more close-ups than Chewbacca. Feels like more narrative backfilling for Last Jedi. Maybe the dice will now get their own spin-off movie.

5) Thandie Newton dies blowing up a railway track that doesn't need to be blown up unless the objective is to piss off the Empire as much as possible. Maybe Newton didn't want to do reshoots and requested that her character be killed off as quickly as possible because she wasn't doing any more Star Wars acting.

6) Coaxium. Sometimes you need a train car, sometimes you need a garbage bin, sometimes you need a suitcase. Was there just one garbage bin worth of coaxium on the train and the rest was, um, packing material? Snow? If they only needed a suitcase of refined coaxium, why did they need to steal an entire train car worth? Why is refined coaxium less volatile than raw coaxium? More importantly, if Crimson Dawn works for/with the Empire, why do they need to steal coaxium? Wouldn't the Empire just, you know, SELL IT TO THEM??????? Thinking of this last was when my brain broke. The entire plot of Solo is... pointless.

7) I guess the revelation is that Dark Helmet turns out to be a girl. And good rather than evil, but primarily a girl. As a revelation, it falls flat because I was sitting there going, "Am I supposed to recognize her? Was she on Star Wars Rebels too? And do these Rebels travel the galaxy on speeder bikes? Because if so, that's definitely some hardcore star travel!

8) Wow, the set-up for the Kessel Run was laborious, wasn't it? On the bright side. Han accidentally kills Cthulhu. Nice work, boys!

9) Jesus, Chewbacca's Wookie pal on the Klingon Penal Asteroid of Rura Penthe looks a lot like Chaka from Land of the Lost. Distractingly so!

10) Is there a Coaxium refinery on Kessel? I don't think so, given that robbing it would make more sense than stealing unrefined coaxium. But if not, getting coaxium to a refinery must be the most dangerous job in the universe given how quickly it turns explodey.

11) Wait, all the Coaxium in the area is located... under the spice mines? Hunh? Kessel: home to spice and Hyperfuel! You'd think they'd fix the place up a bit!

12) This card game doesn't seem that difficult.

Oddly enough, I enjoyed it. Sort of. Lightly recommended.

Tom Hanks Playhouse

Inferno (2016): adapted by David Koepp from the novel by Dan Brown; directed by Ron Howard; starring Tom Hanks (Professor Robert Langdon), Felicity Jones (Sienna Brooks), Omar Sy (Bouchard), Irrfan Khan (Harry Sims), Ben Foster (Zobrist), and Sidse Babett Knudsen (Dr. Elizabeth Sinskey): I actually think this is the best of the Tom Hanks/Ron Howard/Dan Brown movies. Tom Hanks's Robert Langdon is tired and bleary for much of the film (for good reason). The historical clues are almost perfunctory, as if the film-makers finally admitted that the whole point of these things, like a James Bond movie, is the globe-trotting scenery. 

There's a decent twist at the two-thirds mark, the supporting cast is all solid, and Ben Foster finally gets cast correctly, as a squirmy, passive-aggressive billionaire who wants to kill 50% of humanity. Director Ron Howard even presents us with a couple of drug-induced visions for Langdon that are creepy enough to suggest that a Ron Howard-helmed H.P. Lovecraft movie wouldn't have been the botch that such a pairing initially suggested. A perfectly good time-filler. Recommended.

Sully (2016): adapted from the book by Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow by Todd Komarnicki; directed by Clint Eastwood; starring Tom Hanks (Sully), and Aaron Eckhart (Skiles): "Sully" Sullenberger successfully landed a passenger jet on the Hudson River in January 2009. This film is excellent when it sticks to the landing and much less so when the screenplay tries to grind some ideological axe about how awful bureaucracies and government are, courtesy I assume of right-wing brain-trauma survivor Clint Eastwood. 

The National Travel Safety Board investigation (nay, witch hunt) of Sully after the landing is pretty much entirely invented. It doesn't even make much sense: wouldn't the owner and/or manufacturer of the airplane want to roast Sully if anyone, given that the financial loss would be suffered there? Well, no, I guess, because Corporations Are People Too, and good people at that. Good, good people. Bad, bad bureaucrats trying to protect us. Bad! Tom Hanks is fine, as usual, and the landing sequence is tense and thrilling. All the other stuff is right-wing wankery. Lightly recommended.

Real-life Adventures on Land and Sea

The Last Waltz (1978): directed by Martin Scorsese; starring The Band (Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, and Robbie Robertson), Martin Scorsese (The Interviewer), and many other musicians and writers that include Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Neil Diamond, Eric Clapton, Ronnie Hawkins, Muddy Waters, and others: Martin Scorsese's brilliant, occasionally problematic concert movie combines live footage of The Band's last performance with a whole lotta guests (including the jarring appearance of Neil Diamond) with interview sessions with the five members of The Band.

Scorsese clearly had a man-crush on guitarist Robbie Robertson, who dominates the interviews and seems to be in almost every shot of the concert, an impressive feat for someone who never sings lead vocals. The four non-Robertson members of The Band seem fed up with Robbie at times -- and they'd reunite as a foursome sans Robertson several years after The Last Waltz. Hmm. 

You can see why Scorsese fixated on Robertson -- he's the most conventionally handsome of the group, and he's also the most loquacious. In any case, the film itself is essential viewing because of the performances of The Band, the anecdotes, and the astonishing array of guest players and vocalists. And even Neil Diamond is fine and, in the context of the movie, a reasonable choice to represent a particular type of music (Tin Pan Alley and its songwriters) on the movie's journey through an almost comprehensive list of musical influences on The Band. 

Garth Hudson and Rick Danko don't speak much. Richard Manuel and Levon Helm do get some interview time, and both -- especially the charismatic, soft-spoken Helm (aka The Only American In The Band) -- are fascinating. Highly recommended.

In the Heart of the Sea (2015): based on the non-fiction book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick; written by Charles Leavitt, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver; directed by Ron Howard; starring Chris hemsworth (Owen Chase), Benjamin Walker (Captain Pollard), Cillian Murphy (Matthew Joy), Brendan Gleason and Tom Holland (Old/Young Thomas Nickerson), Ben Whishaw (Herman Melville), and Michelle Fairley (Mrs. Nickerson): Ron Howard turns the astonishing true story of the early 19th-century Nantucket whaleship Essex's losing confrontation with a pissed-off male sperm whale into an intermittently faithful, intermittently ridiculous movie. The performances are all solid but unspectacular, hampered by the often stilted and/or dogmatic dialogue that often seems shot through with jarring linguistic anachronisms.

A frame narrative set 30 years after the Essex lost a TKO to the whale is historically ridiculous. And the movie creates a false dramatic narrative in which the Nantucket powers-that-be want to hush up the whaley cause of the Essex's sinking (in reality, they didn't) and the cannibalism in the lifeboats necessitated by being adrift at sea without food for weeks (again, no cover-up -- cannibalism was pragmatically acknowledged by sailors as something that could very well happen because of the realities of life at sea). Oh, well. History sucks! 

This is the sort of movie in which a cargo hold that should be filled with empty barrels to carry home all the whale oil is instead shown as empty throughout the movie so as to visually demonstrate how unsuccessful the whaling expedition has been. I guess in the universe of the movie, the whales bring their own barrels.

The portion of the film stretching from the Essex's departure from Nantucket to its first encounter with the angry whale is really pretty good. Unfortunately, Howard and the screenwriter veer sharply away from history after the sinking of the Essex to turn the movie into a high-toned version of Jaws: The Revenge with a bit of Castaway thrown in. Oh, well. 

The filmmakers also conflate the whale that sunk the Essex with another story about a partially white sperm whale from about the same time period dubbed Mocha Dick by whalers. Ace reporter (well, information-starved novelist) Herman Melville eats this stuff up in the completely fictional frame narrative. We also get some anachronistic environmentalist discussions. In the world of the movie, oil is discovered in Pennsylvania nine years earlier than it was in our universe. Hey, it's an alternate history movie! Lightly recommended.

Invictus (2009): adapted by Anthony Peckham from the non-fiction book by John Carlin; directed by Clint Eastwood; starring Morgan Freeman (Nelson Mandela) and Matt Damon (Francois Peinaar): Engaging sports movie about newly elected South African President Nelson Mandela's attempts to forge unity in his country with the nation's Springboks national rugby team and South Africa's 1995 hosting of the Rugby World Cup. Morgan Freeman as Mandela is excellent and convincing, and Matt Damon is Matt Damon with an Afrikaaners accent as Springboks captain Francois Peinaar. 

The movie is quite faithful to actual events. Clint Eastwood's direction is unobtrusive, and the whole thing goes down pretty smoothly as the earnest Stanley Kramer movie it would have been if it had been made in 1955. A cast of mostly unknowns does solid work in the supporting roles. Traditional and traditionalistic South African songs war with goopy, gloppy, awful Western-muzak-sounding songs on the soundtrack, to an occasionally jarring comic effect. Mandela's favoured 1875 English poem which gave the movie its title was by William Ernest Henly, by the way, though most of us think it was by Rudyard Kipling. The more you know! Recommended.

Montage!

Hitchcock: adapted by John J. McLaughlin from the book by Stephen Rebello; directed by Sacha Gervasi; starring Anthony Hopkins (Alfred Hitchcock), Helen Mirren (Alma Reville Hitchcock), Scarlett Johansson (Janet Leigh), Danny Huston (Whitfield Cook), Toni Collette (Peggy Robertson), Michael Stuhlbarg (Lew Wasserman), James D'Arcy (Anthony Perkins), Jessica Biel (Vera Miles), and Michael Wincott (Ed Gein) (2012): While it plays somewhat fast and loose with the facts, Hitchcock is an enjoyable look at the making of Psycho. The movie was a gamble at the time, which is why Hitchcock funded it himself. And he would ultimately reap the benefits: adjusted for inflation, Psycho would have a $350 million North American gross in 2015... on an adjusted budget of $10 million.

Anthony Hopkins, fat suit and all, makes for a relatively fun Hitchcock, and Helen Mirren is also good as his wife Alma, who worked on all of his films though often without credit. Scarlett Johansson doesn't look much like Janet Leigh, but she's fine in the role. The movie mixes the personal travails of Hitch and Alma with the challenge of adapting Robert Bloch's Psycho when the film censors will allow neither nudity nor graphic violence. Even showing the toilet in Marion Crane's hotel room was a scandalous deal at the time because apparently Americans had never seen toilets before. Oh, censorship board!

As with most films about artists, we never really get a particularly good sense of what made Hitchcock great other than Following His Gut and Believing In Himself. We do get a montage of Hitchcock performing montage at the end (which is to say, editing), as he whips Psycho into shape in the editing room. The artistic process is otherwise pretty much glossed over, which is a shame given Hitchcock's meticulous nature when it came to the technical aspects of great film-making. Virtually all great directors are great technicians. But if you want to know how Hitchcock actually thought, pick up Hitchcock/Truffaut. Recommended.

Night Shift: written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel; directed by Ron Howard; starring Henry Winkler (Chuck), Michael Keaton (Bill), Shelley Long (Belinda), Gina Hecht (Charlotte) and Richard Belzer (Pig) (1982): Ron Howard's first comedy as a director pretty much introduced both Shelley Long and Michael Keaton to the world. It also gave the Fonz one of his few good lead roles in a film, as the introverted, nebbishy night shift supervisor at a New York morgue who almost inadvertantly ends up running a prostitution ring out the morgue. Cue the montage of money rolling in, women trying on clothes, and Michael Keaton being zany.

Michael Keaton plays the Wacky Spirit of Life and Shelley Long plays the Hooker with a Heart of Gold. It all holds up pretty well. It should be shown whenever someone wants to make a case for legalizing prostitution. That Richard Belzer plays a gangster named Pig is pretty funny. And Kevin Costner wanders through as a frat boy at a party. Howard and his screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel would follow this with their break-out hit Splash. In any case, be prepared for casual nudity. And yes, underground sex clubs were and are a thing in New York. Recommended.

Frost/Nixon

Frost/Nixon starring Michael Sheen and Frank Langella, written by Peter Morgan, based on his play, directed by Ron Howard (2008): Neither Sheen, who plays TV personality David Frost, nor Langella, who plays Richard Nixon, look much like their real-world counterparts. In a way, this helps the movie, as we're not stuck comparing faces and mannerisms. The movie -- originally an award-winning play starring the same two actors -- follows the making of the Frost/Nixon television interviews of 1977 from first inspiration to ratings success.

Solid writing that never really does more than skate along the surface is aided immensely by Sheen and Langella's nuanced performances. Langella is especially good in delivering a portrait of an immensely flawed but strangely sympathetic Nixon who, in the movie's conception, has been left alone and brooding by his resignation from the Presidency, realizing that his ego-fulfilling public life is now over. Ron Howard doesn't screw things up, which is a triumph for the Howard school of blatantly telegraphed film-making, though there's some business with Italian shoes that I think we're supposed to view as metaphorically profound. Whatever. Like last year's Doubt, this is a movie carried pretty much entirely by acting and, to a lesser extent, writing, and the acting is dandy.