Jim Henson: Idea Man

I'm Your Puppet

or

Having a Hand in Everything

 

When I was growing up, I fixated on several things to the point of obsession. One was the comic-strip Peanuts. One was America's Space Program. Howdy Doody. Looney Tunes cartoons. J.P. Patches (if you know, you know).

 

Puppets. I think I watched everything that Paul Winchell did. Kukla, Fran and Ollie, Shari Lewis.

 

And Jim Henson. This was before he became the creator of "The Muppets," and was an up-and-coming skit contributor—he'd appear on "The Ed Sullivan Show" and other variety venues, and he had a regular "gig" on "The Jimmy Dean Show" with Rowlf the Dog.

 

But, Henson did things differently. His "bits" would be his bizarre looking puppets (including one which would become well-known as "Kermit the Frog") lip-syncing to some popular record and the bit would usually end with some 90° turn, sometimes violently. They were hilarious and seemed to erupt from some fertile ground of imagination that none of the other entertainers on "The Tube" seemed to have access

.

Henson hadn't intended to become a pioneering puppeteer. He just wanted to get into television, a medium that fascinated him. Although he'd been introduced to puppetry watching the tube, he wasn't personally involved with the art until his last year at Northwestern High School in Hyattsville, Maryland, continuing to study it at The University of Maryland, College Park, where he met his "Muppets" partner and future wife, Jane Nebel.

With wife Jane, Henson devised the skits and bits that the Muppets performed on local and national television shows, as well as doing commercials. On weekends, he began experimenting with film projects, exploring stop-motion animation, rhythmic editing, and juxtaposed cross-cutting. His first, Time Piece, was Oscar-nominated for "Best Live Action Short" in 1965 (it's presented in its entirety below).

Kermit's origins began from the discarded green coat of Henson's mother.

The rest you no doubt know, from Henson's work on Sesame Street—also directing many short avant-garde films for various "numbers" segments—with its vast array of puppets and full-size figures to walk on-set, "The Muppets Show" and movies, "Fraggle Rock," a brief recurring stint on the first season of "Saturday Night"—the percursor title for "SNL," the films The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. Hundreds of hours of content for movies and television. Plus innovations in puppet-performing, animatronics, special effects, and film-making...not to mention overseeing the construction and manufacturing of building imaginative creatures.

Painted halved ping-pong balls for eyes...

Now, Ron Howard just made a documentary about Henson—Jim Henson: Idea Man—and has been the case for Howard's product lately, it didn't get a theatrical release, but went straight to Disney+ for streaming (except for an appearance at the Cannes Film Festival) on May 31, 2024. So, what was it doing as an ABC special this past Sunday? Disney+, being notoriously stingy with their streaming product, put it on broadcast television within 3 months of its premiere...that's a bit unprecedented. But, follow the logic: Henson's Muppet properties (except those wholly owned by Henson) are owned by Disney. Disney also owns the ABC network, and the night it premiered NBC was airing the closing ceremonies of a much-storied Olympic Games. ABC needed to put something special up rather than roll over and die in the ratings. It's as simple as ABC. Or ABC/Disney.

The fledgling Muppet crew

Howard, who has had an illustrious career as a director—aside from his acting career—has turned in another "safe" documentary. Chapter headings, talking heads (good ones!), a smorgasbord of clips that would even please The Swedish Chef, and a design sense based on things Henson himself had innovated. It's by-the-numbers, like a Ken Burns documentary without that director's eye towards the breath-taking shot, the spurious but telling anecdote and the impeccable eye towards getting the most out of a photograph. Howard colors inside the lines.

Howard is no innovator. His films have no mystery, they never haunt, and they never linger in the mind with deeper implications. He tells the story, simply, effectively, and gets out leaving no after-image. Where a recent documentary on Fred Rogers by a great documentarian like Morgan Neville will leave you in contemplation, Howard makes you feel like you've heard the story enough to feel satisfied. It's like a bed-time story told by a competent nanny. Henson would have never done an auto-biographical film, but he would have made it a thrill-ride with thrills, near-spills and a bit of danger to it.

Those elements are best inhabited by the words of Henson's co-workers, kids, ships that passed, and stars that shined for him. Like Frank Oz, who joined Henson as a high-schooler and under his tutelage became a brilliant puppeteer, actor, personality and director and in his interview seems to share a weight of gratitude. Rita Moreno talks about guesting on "The Muppet Show" and blowing take after take because she couldn't stop laughing until the last take where she barely holds it together...and they used it! "The nostril-flares tell you I'm about to lose it." Jennifer Connelly talks about being a 14 year old on a Henson set...co-starring with David Bowie and feeling like the place was a playground.

 

And in a way, it was, one that we all had access to and could play in. We couldn't see the dollars spent, the hours of prep, the uncomfortable positions (try holding your arm up for 10 minutes!), nor could we see the actual performers, merely their avatars, hidden behind desks, tables, props, out of sight and, rather miraculously, out of mind—even to the people they were performing with. We saw the tip of the ice-berg of creativity, that by the time it appeared on-screen had been honed to a science, made easy to laugh at, without having to consider the men (and women) behind the curtain. 

 

Like Oz.

Henson never played it safe. Maybe, someday, there will be a documentary that will take his same radical tack at looking at this man perpetually behind the curtain while simultaneously so on-stage and call the man what he was: a magical genius.

 

The Music Man

The Music Man (Morton DaCosta, 1962) DaCosta had directed "The Music Man" on stage, and parlayed that to direct the film version of "Auntie Mame" in 1958. When it came time for a film version of Meredith Wilson's Iowa-based musical, even the usually-interfering Jack Warner wanted DaCosta to do the film.

 

But, Warner wanted someone else besides Robert Preston—who had played the role magnificently on Broadway—to play the traveling con-man, Harold Hill. James Cagney, Bing Crosby, and Cary Grant were all approached to star and all refused, Grant adding that not only would he not star in it, but if Preston wasn't cast, he wouldn't even go to see it! Warner was about to sign Frank Sinatra, when show creator Wilson reminded Warner that he had final approval of casting written into his contract, and he wanted Preston and no one but Preston.

 

Robert Preston was cast. And performed quite magnificently.

The role played to his strengths...and weaknesses. Preston languished in the outskirts of in-demand stars. He was a good actor, but a wily character actor, not exactly star-material. Handsome, sure, but of a face-type that better suited antagonists than protagonists. He could be comfortable twirling a mustache, but whether sporting one or clean-shaven, he was an aggressive charmer of indeterminate virtue.

This quality made him a perfect match for the role of Harold Hill, a grifter in salesman's clothing, who travels city to city like a circus caravan, bamboozling the local rubes into buying musical instruments for their restless youth to form "boy's bands". Once he's pocketed the cash, he splits town before the instruments arrive, as he couldn't provide any instruction in how to use them, anyway. He SAYS he does, but what grifter can actually do what he says he can?

So, Harold Hill brings his brassy blue-sky ideas to River City, Iowa, where he and a former crony, Marcellus Washburn (Buddy Hackett) start spreading the word of what a wonderful opportunity a boys' band would be to the city's rambunctious and temptation-susceptible youth. There is, being Iowa, skepticism, from the school board, the River City Mayor (played by the inimitable prevaricating Paul Ford) and, in particular for the story's purposes, the city's librarian and music tutor, Miss Marian Paroo (Shirley Jones), but it isn't long before he starts making in-roads with the populace. Not an easy thing to do, for (as the song says) they're "so by God stubborn" they "can stand touching noses for a week at a time and never see eye to eye."

To maximize profits, and still be ahead of the law, he plots a good defense against the offense—he deflects the school board by playing on their voice-characteristics to turn them into a singing quartet, and then decides to seduce the "old maid" (sorry) "sadder but wiser" librarian to short-circuit her logic systems.

It is rather difficult to think of the 27 year young (at the time of the filming) Jones as "an old maid"—she was the same age as ingenue Susan Luckey, who played the Mayor's teen daughter—but, The Music Man is one of those stories where one has to suspend disbelief (after all, the movie hinges on the mulish River City dwellers suspending theirs).

One also has to suspend time and movie momentum, as well. In its 2 hour 31 minute length, there are 22 songs, meaning that the story comes to a full-stop every 5 minutes and change. It would be frustrating if Meredith Wilson's material wasn't so darned good...or so syncopative, a quality that seems to act as a natural buggy-whip to make the festivities move along at a good clip. There is one speed-bump, at the extended "'Til There Was You" sequence where one can actually feel one's pocket-watch tut-tutting. But, the song is so good—Heck, The Beatles even "covered" it!

Future director Ron Howard scopes out an overhead shot

And that's the main draw here. As good—and enthusiastic—as Preston, Jones and Company are, it is the treasure chest of songs that keep the movie percolating from scam to scam, subterfuge to subterfuge, before reaching some genuine feeling with agendas no longer hidden and ending with pure fantasy. That's quite a story arc.

Sure, it's corn. Pure-bred American corn. But, there's nothing as sweet as corn plucked right from the stalk. The Music Man, for all its brass, is just as sweet.

Anytime Movies #8: American Graffiti

While I catch up on the reviews still in "Draft" phase here, I'll re-run a feature I ran when I first started this blog seven years ago,* when it was suggested I do a "Top Ten" List.

I don't like those: they're rather arbitrary; they pit films against each other, and there's always one or two that should be on the list that aren't because something better shoved it down the trash-bin.

So, I came up with this: "Anytime" Movies.

Anytime Movies are the movies I can watch anytime, anywhere. If I see a second of it, I can identify it. If it shows up on television, my attention is focused on it until the conclusion. Sometimes it’s the direction, sometimes it’s the writing, sometimes it’s the acting, sometimes it’s just the idea behind it, but these are the movies I can watch again and again (and again!) and never tire of them. There are ten (kinda). They're not in any particular order, but the #1 movie IS the #1 movie.

What's George Lucas' best film? For most, it's probably Star Wars (I'm sure there's some poor soul out there who likes Radioland Murders). There's a lot to like about his charmingly scruffy homage to the Buck Rogers serials. But one wonders what direction his career might have gone if he hadn't felt the need to exploit that first "Star Wars" movie as much as he did. It seems the more he explained about his initial concepts the worse the movies got, and the more rich and famous they made him, the more elephantine and fossilized they became.

For me, Lucas has yet to top American Graffiti. Made for under a million dollars and filmed mostly at night using a skeleton crew (albeit one headed by Haskell Wexler), it showed just how ingenious Lucas could be when he was strapped for cash. It has the structure and froth of a Shakespeare comedy with the values and budget of an AIP teen flick.  Seemingly aimless, American Graffiti follows four storylines of small town kids on the last night of summer before heading to college. Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) has a scholarship to a big university but is reluctant to go, and spends the night bounced around by local toughs, and diverted by his quixotic pursuit of a phantom blonde in a white Thunderbird. Steve and Laurie (Ron "Ronny" Howard and Cindy Williams) are a couple in transition. Class President and Head Cheerleader, they're the Royal Couple of the Sock-Hop. But Steve can't wait to head out of town to conquer new territory, and Laurie-still in high school-knows she'll lose him when he goes. John (Paul LeMat) is a high school drop-out and legendary hot-rodder endlessly cruising the streets of town, looking for the next race. And Terry (Charles Martin Smith) lives a rich fantasy life (that's a kind way of saying he's deluded) where he can imagine himself everything that he's not.

The Village Square

Lives intersect, couples form and break apart, lies are told, misunderstandings abound (to really make it Shakespeare all you'd need is a set of twins), while the majority of kids drive endlessly in circles--not going anywhere, but hoping to, and if not tonight, there's always tomorrow. They're not going anywhere.

In the background are the constant echoes of rock n' roll pouring out of car windows and reverberating down the hallways and back-alleys, broken only by the howls and shrieks of the common thread in their lives, Wolfman Jack. All the kids have their Wolfman myths and he acts as sage, seer, siren and Master of Ceremonies for the evening's adventures. He's also the Fool and "The Man Behind the Curtain." Ultimately the long night's journey leads to his door-step, and, in disguise, dispenses his wisdom to the seeker. 

The Siren

One thing Lucas always knew was how to make a curtain call and American Graffiti is his best. As Curt flies off to college, he is left two signs of passage: the white T-bird reappears one last time to remind him what he's giving up, while locked away in his plane, the sounds of the radio station that have buoyed and sustained all the characters throughout the night fades to static. For the first time in the film there is no music and in the silence that creates, broken only by the drone of the plane we're told the rest of the story. Terry "goes missing" in Vietnam. Steve is an insurance salesman in town. John is killed by a drunk driver. Curt's a writer in Canada. After that punch in the gut, Lucas unsentimentally hammers it home with one of the cheeriest songs in the Beach Boys catalog—"All Summer Long," dismissed earlier in the film as "surfing shit." Lucas turns the future into a sobering fate—the film is set in 1962. The next year would signal the end of the innocence of the 50's and American Graffiti is a sweet farewell to trivial concerns and living in the past.

The Knight-Mentor

Lucas has said that he based the boys on different aspects of himself in high school--the intellectual, the nerd, the sosh' and the JD. Lucas' lesson in this, and all of his work seems to be "Advance or Die." It's the lesson of Graffiti. It is certainly the basis of the story of Anakin Skywalker. So what became of Lucas? Did he follow his own advice? Well, you could say he went to the future with Star Wars, but he set it in the far-away past. Then he built an Empire of his own...in his hometown.

The Trailer for American Graffiti--in the style of Beach Blanket movie

American Grafitti touched me in two ways. I had already been inspired by Lucas' first film, THX-1138 with its inventive sound-scape, to seek out his work and the work of his sound editor Walter Murch. Grafitti was their second collaboration and pretty much sealed my fate for going into sound work. Listening to it now, it's crude and has a lot of holes and bad edits, but the innovations are just as unique 30 years later and just as inspiring. On top of that, the unglamorous portrayal of a radio disc jockey's life (yet romantic in its anonymous/omnipresent effect on a community) made me think "I could do that!" and I started my sound career spinning discs at a radio station. My last job as such was at a station with a glass window that looked out on the town's "loop." Sort of like watching American Graffiti in reverse. That was KEDO-AM in Longview, Washington--long ago bulldozed.

Wolfman Jack explains it all for you, baby

I'd just done a "Don't Make a Scene" segment for American Graffiti* and was looking forward to writing new "insights" on this film, but reading it again, no, I pretty much covered them all. Not that American Graffiti is that simple—it's just that given Lucas' skimpy out-put, there's not a lot of complexity in his ouvre. It is interesting that Lucas goes the Joseph Campbell route in this film before he actually read "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" and used the "seeker's path" for the construction of Star Wars. He was already using it here and doing variations of it for the four Lucas-aspects, each with different fates (a cautionary tale, indeed). He also uses the cross-cutting on different fronts that would be his staple in the "Star Wars" films, but interestingly in his first Star Wars (A New Hope) and this film, there is no cross-cutting at the end, everyone is melded into the final story-line, buttoning everything up nice and neat. 

He wouldn't do that again.

Mort Drucker's original artwork for American Graffiti

from the Estate of Howard Kazanjian

Anytime Movies:
American Graffiti
To Kill a Mockingbird
Goldfinger
Bonus: Edge of Darkness

* And, on Sunday, we'll put up a "Don't Make a Scene" feature from each week's film.

Frost/Nixon

Written at the time of the film's release...and back in the day when we all thought "emoluments" was some sort of hand-creme...

"That Was the Crook That Was"
or
"David vs. Go-lie-eth"

Well, it was hardly "An Epic Battle for the Truth" (as the movie's tag-line crows). It was more of a stunt put on by David Frost and Richard Nixon to jump-start their respective careers. I remember those interviews and the hoopla they generated. there was a lot of heat in the media about "checkbook journalism," and it was being kind to call it "journalism"—Frost's go-to question always was "What is your definition of love?"* It was, in fact, the news-equivalent of opening Al Capone's vault, or the Billy Jean King-Bobby Riggs tennis match.

But it did happen, quite a bit of the way Frost/Nixon scribe Peter Morgan presents it. The legal wranglings, the rejection by the networks leading to syndication, the sponsorships by the new-tech "Weed-Eater" and Alpo dog food (Lorne Green was the spokesperson). I remember the stories of the exploding light, Nixon's remarks of Frost being his "Grand Inquisitor," even the "Did you do any fornicating?" line that (although it didn't occur right before taping as the movie would have you believe) Nixon threw at Frost when the cameras weren't running.

But there's enough difference to make it suspect. The interviews were not as packed with drama as the movie would have you believe (see the video below). They were quite benign affairs, and Nixon didn't betray any secrets that he didn't want to betray--the movie doesn't tell you that Nixon's deal included 20% of the royalties of the syndication, which made him Frost's partner in the enterprise, and the former president knew that throwing in some red meat would garnish more money for him.

The furthest afield that Morgan goes is the most interesting. The playwright/screen-writer invents a late-night phone-call between Nixon (Frank Langella—after a while you "buy" him, but his Nixon speaks like a dilettante) and Frost (Michael Sheen—his Frost is vocally perfect) before the final interview, the one involving Watergate. Frost, ill-prepared and feeling in over his head, is caught in a moment of self-doubt when Nixon, with a couple drinks in him, calls and has a heart-to-heart comparing Frost's history to his own—of being shunned by the privileged kids, the ones who got all the breaks. Finally, Nixon builds to a fevered pitch and becomes the ranting monster everyone imagines him to have been, yelling that "all those (expletives deleted) can choke!"

And this is the problem: that phone-call never happened.** It's an invention of Morgan's to transition Frost from defeated to fighting, and although it dramatically works, it's a cheat. The truth of the matter is that Nixon is never the monster that the dramatists and speculators want him to be—as threats to democracies go, he was a rather dull one, but, as with Secret Honor, the fictional Nixon, drunk, raving like a bitter lunatic, vengeful and self-pitying (which he was), but dramatically incapable of being Lear, just isn't good enough to square with the man who used his office like a club against his political enemies, and set up his own police force to carry out the dirty work that even J. Edgar Hoover disapproved of. One suspects The Queen isn't nearly as accurate a picture of Elizabeth II. Reality just isn't dramatic enough.

Still, it's a great cast with Kevin Bacon as Nixon's Chief of Staff, Matthew Macfadyen (blonde Beatle-wigged as Frost's producer), Oliver Platt and Sam Rockwell as Frost's researchers, Toby Jones as a perfect Irving "Swifty" Lazar (Nixon's agent), and the original "Bad Seed" Patty McCormack plays a frail Pat Nixon.

It's certainly Ron Howard's most subtle film in years—there's no evidence of the grand-standing direction that weakens a lot of his output, and his asides and cut-aways aren't distractions, but part of the fabric. He merely provides the arena, and lets the actors do their work. It shows just how good a director he is, when he's not trying to show how good a director he is.

Reality and Fiction: Frost and Nixon and "Frost/Nixon"

Some notes from 2019: If there was any real take-away from the Frost Nixon interview, it was the completely naked admission by Nixon that he thought that whatever he did as president could never be considered illegal. Nowadays, he looks like an amateur, but back in the day, hearing that statement you started hearing democracy and America dying.  One of the inspirations to separate from British rule (back in the day) was to get away from the concept that anything a King does is legal, no matter how despicable it might be. Thus, our government is set up with checks and balances and one of those is the court system, which can (yes, very well) determine if a president's actions are illegal or not. Nixon protected his concept of an Imperial Presidency by resigning rather than face prosecution. That would have set a precedent and Nixon was—after all—a good strategist and a lawyer. However, by saving his neck, he set us, as a nation, up for failure. He certainly violated his oath of office to "protect the Constitution" by doing so.

No President is above the law. Only Kings are.

If we buy into the concept of Presidents doing "no wrong," we are ignoring the intentions of the scholars and public men who came up with the concept of "The United States of America" in the first place.

And, at that point, our democracy is only for the powerful, not for the people.

You say you want a revolution, well, I'd love to see the plan.

* My favorite answer was Richard Burton's: "Love is staying up all night with a very sick child...or a very healthy adult." Barbara Walters' go-to question was "If you were a twee, what kind of twee would you be?"

** And Morgan does some obfuscating on the point: in the film, Nixon doesn't recall making the phone-call, although Frost assures him that he did.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

What a Piece of Junk!
or
Too Many Crooks Spoil the Plot

As a witness to the fan-meltdowns that occurred after The Last Jedi, one would think that one would be quite capable of living up to the expectations of adhering to one's own philosophy; in my case, it is "don't go into a movie with expectations." That path leads to the fan-tantrum.

But, unfortunately, I did. I went in to Solo: A Star Wars Story besotted with the fan-speculation: "What if 'Chewie' is the smart one of the two?" I've managed to convince myself that he is in the couple years since I first heard the idea and just has confidence issues.

But, the name of the movie is Solo, he's a fan-favorite and the movie is directed (or re-directed should be the proper term, after Lego Movie directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were sacked over "creative differences") by Ron Howard, who has made a career out of making movies that are exactly what you think they will be going in. 

"Opie" the director doesn't surprise.

Which is why his last Lucasfilm project—Willow, way back in 1998*, done after his movie Gung Ho tanked and before he revived his career with Parenthood—was such an underwhelming dud of a film. I mean, let's face it, Howard is an artist who paints by numbers. He keeps things in focus, follows the shot-lists, doesn't go over-budget, "plays well with others" and is a dependable work-man with a good temperament. But, as a filmmaker, he's no "visionary." He's a general who holds the line but doesn't win the war.

Reportedly, in the creative tumult, he ended up shooting 80% of Solo, so...this one's on him. And the result is that I'd kinda liked to have seen what Lord and Miller were making of the film, because even if wrong, it might, at least, have been interesting.

Because Solo is the first "Star Wars" film I didn't like...or even admire for its ambitions, such as they are. Even though I have no "Han Solo movie I want to make," I can see why fans get upset when things "go South"—not that I've seen that happen, having avoided "The Holiday Special," "The Ewoks" TV movies and the entirety of the "Star Wars" animated series that give the characters such large Easter-Island-carved heads. This is one where there doesn't seem to be anything "Star Wars" about it and just goes through the motions.

"Star Wars" means something to different people, of course (with a bottom-line of competence, which also means different things to different people). But, this is the first really incompetent "Star Wars" film I've seen. And this one is incompetent from the git-go. Han Solo is the not the best character to make a movie of (as I'll get into later). Oh, he's beloved, but that's pretty much because of the first movie where he displayed some change-of-heart from his scoundrel days and found...dare we say it...redemption. Here, he's just a scoundrel. And not a very smart one. And he has no idea what he doesn't know. So, throughout the movie we get to see him stumble around a lot and learn a couple of lessons along the way...about how to be a scoundrel. That's not a great idea for a movie, unless your idea of a great film is Butch and Sundance: The Early Days.

So, the movie is basically "wrong," from conception. And the script from Lawrence Kasdan (who should know better) and his son Jon (who's got a screen credit) doesn't improve things one bit. In fact, they imagine a sort of space-spaghetti western where everybody's within a few shades of dark from each other...but nobody distinguishes themselves (certainly not character-wise) as being worth your attention, let alone trust. It's a movie filled with unreliable narrators and, as such, things get a little confusing.

What's really confusing is where it all fits in the Star Wars timeline. One can assume it fits in between Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Episode VI: A New Hope, but where is a little difficult to pin. Harrison Ford's Han Solo was in the 29-31 age range (Ford was 34 at the time of filming) and Young Han (Alden Ehrenreich) looks to be a young 20's. The film takes us from "The Adventures of Han as a Young Man" to the point where he's going to Tatooine to work for Jabba the Hut. So, how long was he doing that? A few years? We only know about the disastrous last job where he dumped his cargo and had the slug sending bounty hunters after him, but that was about it. He didn't do anything else? Per this movie he didn't do anything really legendary—in fact, the Kessel Run isn't made much of, but, still, even if Han was a low-grade smuggler down the ladder of the profession, what's with the ego? Is he merely deluded? Is Chewie the smart one? It seems this story is there mainly to put a younger guy in the role. It certainly isn't there to broaden the character. So, the conception is ill-conceived and the ambitions for it a bit weak.

So, what's the story? You remember when Obi-Wan Kenobi said of the Tatooine backwater Mos Eisley "you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy." Well, he obviously never went to Corellia, home of many crime syndicates ("food, medicine, and hyperfuel") as well as young Han (not yet dubbed "Solo") and his lady-love Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke). They're two street kid "scrumrats" "olivered" into the White Worms gang run by Lady Proxima (voiced by Linda Hunt) who have managed to squirrel away some hyper-fuel called coaxima, which they could either turn in to the syndicate or use to get off the planet. They decide on the latter, starting a chase through the back-alleys and passageways pursued by Moloch (voiced by Andrew Jack) and Rebolt (Ian Kenney) in a desperate bid to get to a transport depot. After crashing their speeder, they have to continue on the run, but Qi'ra gets captured, but Han uses the coaxium to bribe his way to become a pilot for the Imperial Fleet (they have to bribe them?). The recruitment asks him what his name is. Just "Han." By itself. He has "no people." The recruiter calls him "Han Solo."** Roll credits.

It's three years later and Han is an Imperial fighter and not loving it. He's been kicked out of the Flight Academy for insubordination and has the innate ability for "stickin' your nose where it don't belong." he's advised by an Imperial, Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson), who, with Val (Thandie Newton) and pilot Rio Durant (voiced by Jon Favreau), have less to do with the Empire than they appear. Then, Han (being Han—"Nobody cares," he's told), after voicing his suspicions of the three is disciplined, taken to a prisoner hold with what is called "The Beast," with the clear implication he won't emerge in one piece.

It's at this point that Solo starts becoming such a "call-back" machine that a checklist should be provided in the lobby with every purchase of a large popcorn. Meeting with Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo)? ✓ Meeting Lando "He has a lot of capes" Calrissian (Donald Glover, who's the best player in the movie)? ✓  The Millenium Falcon?✓  "The Dice?"✓  Bar scene with lots of aliens?✓  Han gets his iconic blaster-pistol?✓  Han shoots first?✓  Chewbacca plays with the hologram board-game?✓ Hyper-space jump?✓  The mentoring by a scruffier older guy whose loyalties are questionable?✓  The passive-aggressive Han/Lando man-hug?✓  Re-meet with Qi'ra only to find she's not the woman he left behind?✓  A variation of the "I love you"/"I know" line?✓ 

Around the time Han dumps his cargo (✓ ), I had checked out. That last one happens fairly early on with a sci-fi variation of a train robbery on a monorail, up high in the mountains while going at a very fast clip, but without much wind resistance impeding their progress.*** Not that the way Howard shoots it gives you any sense of where anybody is, or just how much danger being on such a crazy contraption would pose. There's not an awful lot of detail about how the thing works—heck, nobody comes close to being ground in any gears—and just how bloody precarious the monorail is to evoke any sense of real danger for the people scrabbling along the top of it. Chalk it up to the perils of digital film-making; you can't imagine being crushed by megapixels.

That's one episode. But, the whole thing is built around the idea that there are so many roving gangs around every asteroid that eventually you can't tell one band of pirates from another, not what their loyalties might be. At some point, I stopped caring. So much scattered skull-duggery to so little effect. There is a through-line of a mission, but the goal is rather porous and Han and crew spend most of their time just running away—from everybody—for it to seem worth it or even have a clear goal in mind. After awhile, you're just going from one murkily imagined planet ('the subtitle could have been "Fifty Shades of Gray") to another with no distinct end-game.

New bad guys are brought in right up to the end to challenge our less-than-heroes, but you begin to suspect that the only difference between any of them is that the more powerful ones have merely lasted longer. Everybody has larceny in mind with no moral compass (and the way the thing is so dodgily shot, no compass at all!)

An Imperial Destroyer shows up in a nebular cluster during the Kessel Run.
No, no, really, it's in there.

This is Star Wars? The series with the Good Side and the Bad Side? And you have to make a choice between them? In Solo, there is no choice and the morality of things doesn't much enter into it at all. The series with such tag-lines as "Trust your feelings" and "May the Force be with you," sinks to the level where the most sage advice is "Trust nobody...and you'll never be disappointed."
Swell.

Finally, one must wonder why—except that Solo is a "fan-favorite"—that a solo Han Solo film was made in the first place. The main character arc for Solo had already been filmed in the first Star Wars, where Han turns from doubting scoundrel to turning around and diving out of the sun—a sun—to run defense for Luke in taking out the Death Star. That's the character's pivotal moment—a change in character and function. Before that, Han is just a drifter, talking big and not really living up to his own image of himself. He's a supporting character, a big brother, but less of an influence on Luke than Kenobi or Leia. It's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," not "The Cynic with a Thousand Faces." Anything before that is preamble and not emblematic. It's just more of the same and not the most interesting aspect of the character at that.

It's a cautionary predictor of the type of shallow thinking that fan-wishes can produce and one hopes that the folks making the decisions at Disney don't heed when there are stray calls for a "Boba Fett" movie (to what end and why?) or the pursuit of a "Darth Maul" series—again, the character's presence (although alluded to as having survived his bisection from The Phantom Menace in "The Clone Wars") had no influence at all in the events of the original trilogy. Why, then, bother, other than appeasement to the voluble fan-base.

As William Goldman was fond of saying "Nobody knows anything" (an example of which is the many studio rejections of Star Wars when George Lucas was first pitching it). Don't entrust it to folks who know less than nothing.

* You don't remember it? Of COURSE you don't. It was a planned trilogy that never got past the first movie.

** Supposedly, it was this scene in the "pitch" to Disney head Bob Iger that prompted him to say "I'm in." Yeah, but, it's not exactly a "binary sunset."

*** Hey, I recently re-watched Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery and Sean Connery was getting knocked around when that train was going 35 miles an hour!