In short: Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

So, if you go into this origin story for beloved smuggler Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) with the proper mind-set, adjusting your expectations towards a film that’ll not rock your world but may possibly entertain you very well; if you only keep its tortured production history in mind half of the time; if you can survive Donald Glover’s embarrassing performance as Lando coming over like a little kid playing dress up; if you set aside Ron Howard – you might probably find a perfectly enjoyable bit of SF heist blockbuster cinema.

Sure, the film has a sometimes troubling difficulty with hitting the proper emotional beats, despite a game cast that’ll hit whatever note you ask them to it, and about a fifth of the action sequences look surprisingly naff. However, the other four fifths are pretty great – the train job and the big space chase being the obvious stand-outs – showing off some lovingly designed Star Wars places and ideas while using them for some damn fun set pieces.

Quite a few of the space opera heist elements work rather well, too. The film only falters there when its tone makes one of its peculiar shifts into too broad comedy instead of keeping with the slightly silly irony and the space adventures. Or when elements appear and disappear that thematically clearly come down from a much different version of the script than the one the film ended up with.

Being a modern Hollywood film, this does of course also feel the need to explain the origin of as much as it can of what we know about Han Solo, but most of that is fun enough and well enough integrated into the pleasantly episodic flow of the affair. It’s a bit of a mess, sure, but it’s an often very fun and usually never less than entertaining mess.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,sf,crime,ron howard,alden ehrenreich,joonas suotamo,woody harrelson,emilia clarke,donald glover,thandie newton

In short: Rampart (2011)

The first problem I have with Oren Moverman’s Rampart, a film that completely focuses on a racist, corrupt, violent cop with an utterly fucked up personal life as its protagonist is a simple one. The film never really bothers to explain to a viewer why they should care about this David Douglas Brown asshole.

Sure, Woody Harrelson’s playing him with great vigour, and I was never less than convinced that Brown is indeed a racist, corrupt, violent cop with an utterly fucked up personal life, but there’s little interest on display in really explaining or exploring how he got to be all of that, and where his humanity went if he ever had it. There’s also no attempt by the film to give a viewer something, anything about the guy to empathize with despite him being a crock of shit, no point where it tries to find our shared humanity. More problematic still, Brown isn’t just a horrible person, he’s also a really boring horrible person, doing shitty, violent acts that are quotidian and uninteresting when seen as a work of crime fiction. It’s not that the film lacks in telling details, it’s just that none of those details are actually interesting or enlightening to watch. Now, the film might be going for some kind of “banality of evil” shtick, but while that’s a perfectly good philosophical approach, it really doesn’t make the film anymore interesting to go through.


As a matter of more personal taste, I can’t say I have much time for Moverman’s direction either. It’s the kind of visual style that tries to signal “authenticity” by framing scenes badly – a particular favourite of Moverman’s seem to be dialogue scenes where we see nothing of the actors’ faces, because hiding actors behind the furniture is so avantgarde – pointlessly wobbling the camera around, and generally pretending that looking like shit makes a film “more real”. And yes, of course the dialogue’s mumbled (when the film doesn’t just decide to shoot through a window and muffle the sound as if the mikes were behind that window too) and meandering, and much of Los Angeles is apparently piss-yellow.