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Jun. 4th, 2018 04:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretSolo: A Star Wars Story
I liked it, a good deal, though I acknowledge it was not everything one could hope it to be.
I liked that it had the visual look and storytelling vibe of a late '70s/ early '80s scifi movie, that it felt the most like such a movie of any Star Wars movie since the original series... Though I'll say that, especially in the Kessel run sequence, the cinematography and set-dressing reminded me more of Alien than A New Hope. I thought that was a neat choice. I liked the throwback feel and the lack of modern breakneck pacing. Even the Kessel run sequence, all about going fast, which certainly could have been played frenetically, had a certain leisureliness to it that upped the suspense and gave time to appreciate the visuals.
I liked how un-silly it was. I kept expecting, during the train job sequence, to see greenhorn Han and Chewie making slapstick mistakes, because that was the movie I thought we'd be getting. I expected a Solo movie full of pratfalls and one liners. But we didn't get that. We had betrayals and twists, but they didn't never added up to Fiasco levels of bonkers, and they were all grounded in well-developed character motivations.
I also thought it seemed like a very viddable movie, and I look forward to seeing what fandom does with it. It had interesting repeated visual motifs throughout- I'm looking forward to the vids that use the hanging dice, in particular. It also had a lot of visual continuity with the classic trilogy, so I'm looking forward to vids doing a more longitudinal study of the Han and/or Lando and/or Chewie as characters over time, and vids that compare Solo!Han to ANH!Luke and Leia in terms of being young and idealistic and willing to fight the universe over anything. And the shot of L3 opening the shackles of the robots deserves a place in every RESIST-themed multivid for the next decade.
I've seen the argument from some reviewers that the movie doesn't work because Han exists best as a somewhat static secondary character who supports and challenges classic protagonists, and that Solo does not have much of a character arc for Han, but I didn't agree with that evaluation. I thought Qi'ra's "You're a good guy," was one of the movie's more interesting lines, and it prodded the viewer to think about the movement of Han's moral choices throughout the film. He starts the film as a thief and ends the film as a thief, but in the middle we someone continually rethinking when he needs to look out for himself first and when he has the luxury of taking the moral course when it carries a personal cost, and I thought that made a really effective character arc. We see Han do some pretty shitty things in the movie, which make his hero choices all the more surprising and interesting when they do happen.
Otherwise, I had a good weekend. I went to a young professionals Shabbaton, with outdoor Friday night barbeque dinner and good conversation and singing, followed by a Shabbos day of boardgaming and more good conversation and Torah learning. I read the beginning of Zvi Lampel's The Dynamics of Dispute: The Makings of Machlokess in Talmudic Times, which was fascinating and really clarified a lot of ideas about how the Talmud works. There's a lot of times when it's not obvious at first when studying an Amoraic machlokess what the point of the argument is, what the difference between the sides is and why it matters- Lampel's book is full of tools for answering that question.
Sunday morning I davened at my usual Sunday minyan, which has had a tough week. Three semi-regular members passed away in the last week and a half. They asked me to daven for the amud, I think deliberately as a counter to the tough week: I was the youngest person there by twenty five or thirty years, and I inject needed youthful vigor, even though I'm hardly a child myself anymore. It's going to keep happening, the minyan is full of wonderful octogenarians and that's what happens to octogenarians. It's sad, but just a fact of life.
After davening, I went for a bike ride on the Middlesex Greenway, a converted railbed trail. This went very well at first. I rode fifteen lovely miles without incident, and I was really enjoying myself. The trail is carved straight through the middle of Metuchen and Edison with big tall trees on both sides, a little oasis of nature in suburbia. But on the return, less than a quarter mile from home, I realized I was going too fast heading into an intersection and overbraked and tossed myself off the bike, smashing one of my headlamps and getting a few scratches on my hand and legs. My bike appears basically fine, though, fortunately, and so do I. But I would like to get better at not doing that. Maybe that means not riding as fast.
I liked it, a good deal, though I acknowledge it was not everything one could hope it to be.
I liked that it had the visual look and storytelling vibe of a late '70s/ early '80s scifi movie, that it felt the most like such a movie of any Star Wars movie since the original series... Though I'll say that, especially in the Kessel run sequence, the cinematography and set-dressing reminded me more of Alien than A New Hope. I thought that was a neat choice. I liked the throwback feel and the lack of modern breakneck pacing. Even the Kessel run sequence, all about going fast, which certainly could have been played frenetically, had a certain leisureliness to it that upped the suspense and gave time to appreciate the visuals.
I liked how un-silly it was. I kept expecting, during the train job sequence, to see greenhorn Han and Chewie making slapstick mistakes, because that was the movie I thought we'd be getting. I expected a Solo movie full of pratfalls and one liners. But we didn't get that. We had betrayals and twists, but they didn't never added up to Fiasco levels of bonkers, and they were all grounded in well-developed character motivations.
I also thought it seemed like a very viddable movie, and I look forward to seeing what fandom does with it. It had interesting repeated visual motifs throughout- I'm looking forward to the vids that use the hanging dice, in particular. It also had a lot of visual continuity with the classic trilogy, so I'm looking forward to vids doing a more longitudinal study of the Han and/or Lando and/or Chewie as characters over time, and vids that compare Solo!Han to ANH!Luke and Leia in terms of being young and idealistic and willing to fight the universe over anything. And the shot of L3 opening the shackles of the robots deserves a place in every RESIST-themed multivid for the next decade.
I've seen the argument from some reviewers that the movie doesn't work because Han exists best as a somewhat static secondary character who supports and challenges classic protagonists, and that Solo does not have much of a character arc for Han, but I didn't agree with that evaluation. I thought Qi'ra's "You're a good guy," was one of the movie's more interesting lines, and it prodded the viewer to think about the movement of Han's moral choices throughout the film. He starts the film as a thief and ends the film as a thief, but in the middle we someone continually rethinking when he needs to look out for himself first and when he has the luxury of taking the moral course when it carries a personal cost, and I thought that made a really effective character arc. We see Han do some pretty shitty things in the movie, which make his hero choices all the more surprising and interesting when they do happen.
Otherwise, I had a good weekend. I went to a young professionals Shabbaton, with outdoor Friday night barbeque dinner and good conversation and singing, followed by a Shabbos day of boardgaming and more good conversation and Torah learning. I read the beginning of Zvi Lampel's The Dynamics of Dispute: The Makings of Machlokess in Talmudic Times, which was fascinating and really clarified a lot of ideas about how the Talmud works. There's a lot of times when it's not obvious at first when studying an Amoraic machlokess what the point of the argument is, what the difference between the sides is and why it matters- Lampel's book is full of tools for answering that question.
Sunday morning I davened at my usual Sunday minyan, which has had a tough week. Three semi-regular members passed away in the last week and a half. They asked me to daven for the amud, I think deliberately as a counter to the tough week: I was the youngest person there by twenty five or thirty years, and I inject needed youthful vigor, even though I'm hardly a child myself anymore. It's going to keep happening, the minyan is full of wonderful octogenarians and that's what happens to octogenarians. It's sad, but just a fact of life.
After davening, I went for a bike ride on the Middlesex Greenway, a converted railbed trail. This went very well at first. I rode fifteen lovely miles without incident, and I was really enjoying myself. The trail is carved straight through the middle of Metuchen and Edison with big tall trees on both sides, a little oasis of nature in suburbia. But on the return, less than a quarter mile from home, I realized I was going too fast heading into an intersection and overbraked and tossed myself off the bike, smashing one of my headlamps and getting a few scratches on my hand and legs. My bike appears basically fine, though, fortunately, and so do I. But I would like to get better at not doing that. Maybe that means not riding as fast.