Henrik Ibsen Meets Captain Phasma

     A movie review I will write and other things I will write about.  

     No Yoda in this one, Solo: A Star Wars Story, directed by Mr. Commercial Filmmaker Himself, Ron Howard.  Howard directed a great love story/urban fantasy, Splash, in 1984, bringing Daryl Hannah to my attention--thank you, Mr. Howard.  Splash starred Tom Hanks and John Candy, Hanks before he was in everything.  He had done Bachelor Party and his in-drag role on the TV sitcom, Two Cocks in Dresses, i.e. Bosom Buddies.

     That show starred Donna Dixon, a reason for my sixteen to eighteen year old self to watch it.  Hanks and Peter Scolari dress as women to live in a sorority because campus housing is full to the max, like it's  World War Two.  Scolari, shorter, like a woman, pulls it off more so than Hanks's Buffy Wilson woman impostor.  Buffy Wilson is a beast.  Picture Tony Curtis as Josephine in Some Like It Hot, except that Curtis managed to act as a woman with some accuracy in mannerisms.  Hanks's Buffy Wilson, in love with Donna Dixon (Sonny Lumet) the tall blonde dish, is tall and stiff, resembling more Cary Grant in I Was a Male War Bride than anyone believable as a woman. 

     Howard's Splash, a wistfully romantic dude-and-his-mermaid-lover story, works subtly, taking an absurd premise but sticking with it, following its possibilities and developments logically, with storytelling skills evident.  Solo: A Star Wars Story is the most overblown balloon of a movie I've seen in quite some time, with a story that failed to engage me each of the three times I tried to watch it.

     The thing cost 275 million dollars to make.  Adjusted for inflation, Gone With the Wind in 1939 cost 73 million in today's dollars.  More efficient use of resources.

     The numerous Black actors and actresses in that film, too, were paid a shameful fraction as much as their White acting colleagues.  

     Still, 73 million dollars to make Gone With the Wind today, no CGI.  Except that star salaries in the 1930s were relatively low.  They lived in mansions, partied hard, did orgies probably, but the cost of living was less.

     Solo, a shallow bomb of a movie, shows what happens when a director and a producer and writers with maybe good ideas, fail to create something interesting and coherent.  Lack of coherence in Solo makes for a difficult viewing experience.  Han throws a rock through a window, exposing a hideous, "foul" Lady Proxima (clit-shaped, with caterpillar legs).  Sun shaft pierces the dark room; Lady Proxima feels the heat on her backside, turns and stares at the sun for three seconds, skin on her clit head blotching red and smoking, takes the pain for three seconds before diving into the water.  Problem: when you burn yourself you jerk away from the heat source immediately.  Only a comedian like Curly Howard would stand in front of a torching heat source, letting it scorch him for three seconds.  Lady Proxima cries in agony, letting herself be burned for three seconds.  

     This would not happen.  This is one reason this film sucks.

     The opening with Solo driving away from armed men, camera positioned on the hovercar's hood, is a dynamic shot, but Howard doesn't hold it long enough.  I tried to watch this movie with an open mind but by the third try I hated the film, halted the DVD, returned the package to the library.  Someone else can endure or enjoy this garbage made with a pile of gold.

     Reflecting on the Star Wars films, my perspective has been influenced by having seen the first film in July 1977 when I was thirteen years old.  By then I had absorbed Robin Hood stories, King Arthur, some medieval history, World War Two, and I'd seen and been baffled by 2001: A Space Odyssey in the theater on a rerelease.  I knew Star Trek well from tv syndication, seeing it at odd times like 4:00 pm weekdays, after school, something to look forward to.  I watched Star Trek in black and white, such was my parents' tv, a Zenith, the only product they trusted in electronics.  Star Wars was in color on a big wide screen, Vader was huge in his black robes, the ships were enormous and fast, the sounds they made in space (impossible but who cared?) were cool and gave the impression of speed and high-powered engines, long journeys to new adventures.

     I could relate to Luke Skywalker, the young hero, the orphan, or so he believes.  But I found most fascinating the Millennium Falcon, as a piece of hardware.  "What a hunk of junk!" Luke says, for he can't swear, he's the innocent leading us into the story.  The ship proves to be fast, if ornery, in its performance.  Han and Chewie probably spend lots of their time repairing the ship in various ports in the galaxy.  They probably know a lot of people on different planets.  Han has probably enraged a few crime lords other than Jabba.  Chewie maybe met Yoda somewhere.  Yoda taught Chewie to levitate and juggle three balls at the same time, perhaps.  Yoda allowed himself to be used as a volleyball when some Wookiee children had lost theirs.  Han, in Solo, has too many major characters around him.  The movie never becomes his.  If you name the movie after a character, the character so honored should have something important to do in the movie.

     The next of the Star Wars films, from 1980, The Empire Strikes Back, is the worst of the eleven so far, an absolute botch of a movie with no character development, badly directed action scenes, clunky special effects, and the weird choice of having William Shatner voice Darth Vader because James Earl Jones wasn't available.  Sounds like Captain Kirk coming out of the black Darth mask, with all of Shatner's typical halting and abrupt speech patterns.

     There's good reason to believe Han and Leia will get together, that they love each other, but the two act aloof, Leia having the hots for Luke, but Luke is obsessed with learning the secret of snow.  He sings the dumbest song in the history of dumb songs.  "Why is Snow?"  Then the attack comes, led by turtle-shaped tanks that get flipped over by rebel armored scoops, one driven by Han, who flips two tanks and blasts in the back three terrified men.  The tank treads grind along in the frozen air, the men inside are trying to get out, gas leak, kaboom!  Granted, that was a satisfying scene, visceral and exciting.  Imperial troops on fire running through the snow, can't get enough of that!  

     Having C-3PO get his arm caught between two damaged bulkheads on the Falcon for over forty-five minutes of screen time slows the pace.  Returning over and over again to the golden droid, just to think, "Oh, 3-PO is still stuck."

     Other pointless scenes, such as Chewie hogging time in the Falcon's only bathroom.  Leia and Han have to pee, Luke wants to rub one out, R2-D2 wants to perform a scheduled diagnostic on the flushing valve of the high performance but finicky droid toilet.  C-3PO talks non-stop and while still stuck between bulkheads tells a story for five minutes about a droid head that taught him Bocce in 14.8 milliseconds.  

         The Return of the Jedi needed to be darker, Ewoks needed to be targeted by the Empire for genocide, the genocide had to be carried out, a wiping out of a people in total, not a botched genocide, a genocide writers will compose over fifty books about, a genocide to use as an example for future genocides, but no, the Ewoks triumph!  Although the captive Princess motif, her second try at that, seems to suit Leia, who gets captured easily.  Here she wears "the costume."  Perched atop a mound of shit with a cerebral cortex, Jabba, Leia poses for the camera, for George Lucas, for Warren Beatty, for Eddie Fisher, for the God of her bipolar brain contemplating how she earns a living acting in a movie with a giant pile of crap she's supposed to seem comfortable sitting on, and a group of forest bears with guns.

     Now we come to the height of Star Wars, The Phantom Menace from 1999.  Sixteen years without a film in the franchise is a long time, but Lucas had this new trilogy cooking, the best of the three trilogies, a study of the young life of Darth Vader, Anakin Skywalker, a boy who doesn't seem to have a father, apparently his mom is some kind of Virgin Mary.  He's freakishly heavy in the Force, his metacholin count is higher than most anyone's, he's Space Jesus.  Here, though, George Lucas has taken away the spiritual component of his philosophy of the Force and made it into simple chemistry so that I can understand it. 

      This movie has the best special effects of the series, the best acting, Jake Lloyd's most promising newcomer award, the best light saber duel.  The best droid comedy with all those fighting droids getting dismembered (we know now where the Empire's scrap metal supply comes from), and the best sidekick, Jar Jar Binks.

     That Jar Jar was excised from the next two movies shows how willing George Lucas is to listen to criticism from those screaming at him to kill Jar Jar, or have him get lost down a well, or blown up, or made into someone's secretary, or maybe have his head put on a factory droid's body, working an assembly line, conscious of himself as Jar Jar Binks, trapped for decades in a shit job that will exist whether the Empire falls or not.  

     Jar Jar Binks, in my opinion, is the most animated character in the film.  Liam Neeson acts as if he's imitating a sedate Japanese weapons master.  His Irish face and voice sound like a man who spent thirty years brawling in taverns.  Why not have a rough and tumble Jedi master?  Ewan MacGregor's Obi Wan sounds like Alec Guinness, for Ewan studied Guinness's voice from films of the 1950s, but he seems drawn inside himself, like he can't go outside the Obi Wan character who was a warm figure, stern when necessary, but overall likable, whereas his younger self played by Ewan is a plank.  If you have a plank and an ex-brawler light saber dueling a Sith Lord with maybe 20 years of focused fighting experience and training behind him maybe it makes sense that the Sith Lord dispatches the ex-brawler, who gets in a few licks, burns off a patch of cloak, burns a calf, but the Sith Lord, Darth Maul, bisects Liam who drops into one of those Star Wars chasms that are part of vast structures.

     The hero dying inside a vast structure.  Luke getting his hand taken off in a huge structure, falling into a hole at the base of that structure, his severed hand dripping on a metal alloy floor far below.

     Young Obi Wan goes against Darth Maul who wipes the floor with him.  Split open from crotch to the top of his head, Obi Wan's gashed open body bubbles blackly against the gray-painted metal wall.

     Darth Maul, anti-hero of the next two movies.  In Attack of the Clones, Darth Maul leads an invasion against the Nine Rebellious Planets.  CGI Carrie Fisher, before she got captured by Darth Vader, advises Jason Statham and Vin Diesel who command a wing of the Rebel Fleet facing Maul's marauders.  Statham, the hothead, wants to do an all out attack, "for my brother," who died fighting the Empire.  Vin says no.  "We wait until midnight.  Then, they can watch out."

     Jane Fonda plays the President of the Senate, plotting against the Emperor, who finds her out and puts her in a painbox until she's rescued by Anakin Skywalker.  She was Anakin's neighbor when he grew up and made cookies for him when he cut his finger badly.

     George Lucas blew it when he had Obi Wan kill Darth Maul in the first prequel instead of making Maul the main antagonist, with the Emperor a background figure emerging strongly in Revenge of the Sith, as he does.  Maul as Anakin's trainer would have been interesting.  Maul teaches Anakin some sorcery to use as dark force magic.  He learns the force choke from Maul.  Maul and Anakin go camping together, they tell each other stories about their backgrounds.  Maul had a normal childhood.  His parents were Lutherans, his high school won state championship in golf three years in a row.  He turned to evil for the money and the chicks.  

     Anakin is a quiet type, loves just one woman, the porcelain-complected Amygdala.  She knew him when he was a boy, now he's a young man, or teenager, professing puppy love to his better.  She humors him, hopes he'll grow up before their marriage begins, otherwise she'll look elsewhere.

     In my version Anakin volunteers to try out the Darth suit, finds it comfy.

     In Revenge of the Sith we see that Anakin's legs are burned off, his face badly scarred.  In spite of his growing command of the Force's Dark Side, he was unable to overturn the physical law that says that skin burns when in contact with lava.  

     A horribly burned man, did his junk survive?  Did his genitals get cooked?  If Darth Vader's nuts and joystick have shriveled and blackened like tree parts does he miss this aspect of life?  Does he feel resentment aplenty toward Obi Wan, stealer of his manhood?  I do not profess to know the answers to these perplexing questions.  I think it's possible, though, that Darth Vader walks around as a eunuch, impotent as his soul is gone towards servitude to the machine of the state.  

     A conference paper entitled "Darth Vader's Junk: What Happened To It, and Why Does It Matter?" may be forthcoming.

     I read R.A. Salvatore's New Jedi Order novel, Vector Prime, the first in the series, where Chewie dies at the end.  Lucas approved the offscreen death of Chewie for a Star Wars novel.  This reflects the false Chewie death in The Rise of Skywalker, a film seemingly having nothing to do with the original Star Wars films, Luke Skywalker emasculated, Leia turned into the Good Witch of the North, force-flying in a vacuum without dying.  Solo killed by his son, light saber through his body, no respect.  J.J. Abrams' filmmaking reminds me of the productions of a college student who has mastered the slick elements of filmmaking but who lacks the depth of character to make anything profound.

     To make anything say something, for these later Star Wars films say nothing except "We're making money, Yay!"  

     The art of film suggests automatically the development towards original ideas expressed instead of stale approaches tried countless times before.  Even the blue lettering at the beginnings of all nine Star Wars movies, a technique borrowed from the 1930s Buck Rogers serial, gets old in the later films.  I say go right into the action and don't overwhelm the eyes with so much shit going on across the screen I can't follow it, like when I saw Aquaman and suffered hallucinogenic eye burnout.  The space fight at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith is a case I'll point out.  So many ships flying through space, more collisions should be happening, I'm thinking as I watch this.  How does a space pilot tell a friend from a foe in such a speckled mess of spaceships speeding at multiple angles.  R2-D2 on hand to repair a damaged part.  The mechanic with a little man inside.

     Inside Anakin, it turns out, is a machine. 

     A machine called Disney.

     Movies have always had the propensity for badness.  Misfires happen in film production.  Editing can sometimes harm a film when a better editing job would have saved it.  

     Star Wars is about hype and the money generated from hype.  Case in point, Captain Phasma, a woman Stormtrooper Leader who wears, for no explained reason, shiny reflective armor.  It looks striking, but what is the point of it?  She has a few dramatic entrances but her purpose in the last film trilogy seems to have been to serve as a model for toy figurines.  

     Retell the third trilogy from Captain Phasma's point of view.  Adversary to Jedis and the Alliance, antagonist, the enemy general facing clever opponents.  Something happens that turns Phasma around for the third film so she's fighting with the Alliance, but it's one doomed to fail to Phasma's treachery, which causes a huge problem for the heroes to solve, but one that doesn't involve the invincible Rey coming back from the dead.

     Captain Phasma, like Jar Jar Binks, got herself reduced in her trilogy, killed off in the second film reportedly because director Rian Johnson didn't like the character.  He didn't like Luke Skywalker either, considering he has the Last Jedi, the legend himself who defeated Darth Vader in a light saber duel, throw away his light saber instead of taking up the training of Rey, who asks for it.  Titanic waves of vomit splash upon this character decision by Johnson and whoever else.  Disrespect for a beloved character does not play well and in future decades the mistake will be most apparent to discerning viewers among new generations looking at the films for the first time and noticing one of the greatest mismanagements of a character (Luke) in film history.

     My Captain Phasma, like my Jar Jar Binks, deserves more screen time.  Jar Jar Binks as a diplomat or senator or whatever he is doesn't come across.  I'm used to seeing Jar Jar get his tongue grabbed by Liam Neeson as he's going for a bug.  I enjoy Jar Jar's casual Caribbean stoned islander's loping stroll.    

     Jar Jar Binks should've had his own movie, Meesa Gotta Bad Feeling About This!  

     Randy Quaid plays Jar Jar Binks's grandfather, Ganja Binks.  He tells Jar Jar a story about a Gungan, played by Jar Jar, who accidentally buys a jar of beans instead of the spice he was supposed to buy for his mother's soup.  She throws out the beans.  Overnight there are bean vines heading out of sight taller than the highest seaweed towards what science fiction author Kenneth Bulmer called "the silver sky," undersurface of the sea.

     From Beyond the Silver Sky (Bulmer's wonderful 1960 novel) Stormtroopers in SCUBA gear descend the high weeds.  Jar Jar scrambles up a free stalk.  Climbing, he emerges into daylight.  A troop carrier and a hover ship nearby reveal this side of the military operation against his people.  

     The Empire must want our snacks, Jar Jar's character thinks.

     He swims to the opposite side of the lake, walks over a rise, sees a castle in a valley.  Inside the castle is a rocket.  Jar Jar gets in and blasts off for the moon of a gas giant.  He's found the Rebel stronghold on Yavin.  He becomes a mascot of Red Squadron 4.  He's there when Luke shows up.  He tunes up Luke's X Wing fighter, he fixes a rotation problem on R2's swivel head, smiles his big tooth smile.  He's there when the awards ceremony happens in Riefenstahl Hall.  

     I'm picturing Randy Quaid's face in Independence Day, how delighted he is to commit suicide while blowing up the alien mothership.    

     For Mankind, Randy "blowed up, blowed up real good." (SCTV reference).

     J.J. Abrams, director of Episodes 7 and 9, applied his shallow slick surface touches throughout, creating flat characterizations, boring dialogue, and a hard to follow plot that seemed slapped together without an editing job done on the rough draft.  It's okay to edit, to eliminate even good ideas from a script.  Movies aren't just too long in recent years, they're badly edited, scenes lasting longer than necessary.  Trimming throughout an entire film would yield a few minutes cut out.  Such tightening can make a big difference in the viewer's experience and ease bladder pressure.  

     That professional editors don't know this is hard for me to believe.  They must be paid to pad out movies.  Marvel got into the habit of adding a brief scene after the credits, or during the credits.  I never could make sense of these tidbits, they always referenced an upcoming Marvel movie.  I think they could make a two hour ten minute film of just scenes like that, teasers, dub in different voices, somebody talking like Ruth Gordon to do the voice of Black Widow.  Schwarzenegger for Iron Man, and Cyndi Lauper for Storm.  The voice of Logan could be Rich Little doing Walter Brennan.

     I'm aware that anyone under forty doesn't know the name Walter Brennan.  Character actor.  Prominent role as the Earps' chief antagonist in My Darling Clementine, great movie.  O.K. Corral.  Name your town Tombstone and you're sending a message.  Like calling it Gravemound, or Ashes to Ashes, or Coffin City, or Ghouls Are Welcome.

     Plays, are they worth reading?  One doesn't have to spend money to go to the theater, wear a mask and watch Macbeth.  But I'd see Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder, or Rosmersholm.  

     Ibsen's Little Eyolf: "The crutch was floating!"  

     Little Eyolf, crippled boy with a crutch, drowns, hence his mother says the thing about the crutch.  What drew Eyolf to the lake?  A will o the wisp?  A witch?  Something I can't remember because I read the play over thirty years ago?  A toy fallen in before he waded in?  Lost his footing, felt the water in his sinuses, panicked, muscles tense, big gulp into his lungs, more, final struggle, loss of resistance.  Floating crutch.  

     Ibsen, with those four words uttered by the mother, identified how Eyolf and the crutch were freed of each other.  Eyolf was no longer with his parents, they had no more Eyolf burden, no more Eyolf love.  No more Eyolf silly talk or adorable moments.  No more swimming in that lake.  No Monkey's Paw spell for drowned Eyolf, thank God.  No Pet Sematery climax.  Ibsen's realism uses no werewolves or sorcerers, no ghouls gnawing the flesh of the freshly buried, no body snatching as in Robert Louis Stevenson's story on that profession, he who also wrote of buried treasure, child abduction, and a one-legged man with a wooden leg instead of a crutch.

     Shallowness and depth can appear in the same work, as in the punning going on in Hamlet amidst the serious stuff.  Hamlet, advising Rosencrantz and Guildenstern before they journey to England as messengers, knows he sends the oblivious pair to their deaths.  He plays with them humorously, sadistically, like the dick he is.

      Hamlet: Total Dick, A Theory.

     His killing of Polonius is the act of a dickhead who reacts instead of thinks.  This idiotic move leads to Hamlet killing Polonius's rightly outraged son, Laertes.  Ophelia, Laertes' sister, having lost her father and brother, goes mad and drowns herself, like Little Eyolf.

     If you wipe out a family are you a total dick?  Does my theory hold a little water, at least?

     The Ghost of Hamlet's Father instructs his son to kill Claudius the Usurper, who murdered Hamlet's Father and married Hamlet's Mother, Gertrude.  Hamlet instead analyzes life and death, contemplates suicide, by the end kills Claudius, but also does what's called heavy collateral damage on numerous others.  

     Hamlet is not cut out to be a focused assassin.  His passions engage, allowing his reason to run wild.  He's a teenager and maybe a few years older by the end, but he doesn't make it to thirty.

      Hamlet was the first Shakespeare play I read when I was young.  I heard it also on a radio set that also picked up tv stations the Olivier version of Hamlet from 1948, with Jean Simmons as Ophelia, also his Richard III (which, unlike the 1948 Hamlet, I've seen on the screen rather than just heard it).  

     Solo, in short, failed to excite this viewer's attention.  If anything, the film screams at us that the franchise is spent, creatively.  The studio and shareholders are just making money off of something that used to be good.  Gungans never intrigued us like the Tusken Raiders or the Jawas, the little junk men of the desert in their cargo carrier the size of a skyscraper.  In those years did Frank Herbert's Dune seem to merge with the desert scenes of Star Wars.  

     1977, year of Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Orca, Saturday Night Fever, Eraserhead.  

     Entertaining viewers with good stories, not a bad idea, Hollywood of 2021.  

Vic Neptune