Movie Nation

So much for the hope that the back-engineered “prequels” in the “Star Wars” universe would rescue these space operas from the bloat and boredom that J.J. Abrams and friends have given them.

“Solo: A Star Wars Story” is a two hour and fifteen minute salvage job, with director Ron Howard coming in to add a little life and a few laughs to whatever original directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (“22 Jump Street,” “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”) struggled to provide.

And the answer to that is “not enough.” The damage had already been done, mostly with casting, and entrusting the script to Hollywood nepotism, the great has-been Lawrence Kasdan (“Raiders of the Lost Ark,” etc.) and his actor-turned-not-very-good-writer son, Jonathan.

Alden Ehrenreich (“Hail, Caesar!”) is the young Han Solo in this origin tale, suggesting not so much a young, tall and hunky Harrison Ford but a young, short, grinning-until-his-eyes-squint-shut Jon Cryer or Ethan Embry.  From his first moment, his first line in the picture, he’s off.

Han is enslaved on the shipyard planet Corellia, declaring himself a pilot and trying to swipe and hustle up enough cash to get him and his smarter (as usual) girlfriend Qi’ra pronounced Kyra (Emilia Clarke) free. He’s a bit bruised up, and she’s concerned.

“You should SEE them,” Ehrenreich brags, implying “You should see the OTHER guys,” and totally hitting the line-emphasis wrong.

It happens again and again in Ehrenreich’s clumsy, nebbishy, chuckle-headed take on the future swashbuckler Han Solo. Because, apparently, there are no re-takes in spaces.

We see how Han got his surname (all alone in the cosmos, no family, he’s an Imperial recruit). We watch him meet Chewbacca, a hilarious scene reminiscent of Luke’s tangles with assorted beasts in assorted arenas in the original trilogy, and a big joke moment from “Thor Ragnarok.”

And we’re there the night he meets “ol’pal” Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), elaborately described as a “retired” smuggler, “sophisticated,” “charismatic” “and attractive, too.”

Billy Dee Williams’ ears must be burning, even though they left out “sauve” and “debonair” from that standard-description of Williams in general, and the character he first made famous. Glover is mostly up to the task, suggesting a worldly card player who gambles with his ship at Intergalactic poker and his life as “the Kessel Run” with Han.

Han is separated from his first love, Qi’ra, and takes up with his second, the Millenium Falcon, to win her freedom from the Crimson Dawn gangster Dryden Vos, played by Paul Bettany as more whimsical and mercurial than menacing. He’s just…wrong.

The casting they nailed is giving Woody Harrelson the role of a pistol-twirling smuggler and thief named Tobias Beckett, and making the smart and sexy Thandie Newton his demo expert, second-in-command lover. But let’s screw up the gang with a four-armed digital frog thingy who acts and sounds (Jon Favreau did the voice) like a PG version of Rocket Raccoon from “Guardians of the Galaxy.”

It’s not stealing if it’s all under the Disney umbrella, kids.

The gang has to slip the clutches of the just-expanding Empire, outsmart the Hyperfuel mine owners and shippers, pull off a train heist and evade the “Marauders” bent on stealing from them them as they do.

On the plus side, the diverse cast feels organic and not forced into the “universe,” no Death Stars, no light saber duels, no “Force” and no original cast members were harmed in the making of this. Original characters’ legacies, on the other hand, take a bit of a licking.

It’s an underlit picture dominated by gloomy, shadowy visuals, visceral fights and shoot-outs and what feels and sounds like dialogue from a TV quickie “prequel” cranked out for The Disney Channel. This is the least quotable “Star Wars” movie ever.

Clarke, of “Game of Thrones,” is Qi’ra, here to sex up this spin in “A galaxy far, far away.” She has little chemistry with Ehrenreich, none of the heat that was called for and none of the adult pathos and passion that Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher brought to their PG love scenes, way back when.

The chases are same-old/same-old involving the Falcon, Tie Fighters and some space phenomenon that isn’t the asteroid or debris fields of early “Star Wars” movies. The picture opens with a dull surface-speeder pursuit that doesn’t raise the pulse-rate at all.

There are more card games than “Battle Bots” competitions (look for Ron Howard’s brother Clint, there), more filler Falcon flying sequences than moments where anybody seems in genuine peril.

The stakes, gravitas, wit and great actors demonstrating great acting of “Rogue One,” the best of these new LucasFilms, are sorely missed.

A couple of times, Howard gets things to play as giddy — that first Han/Chewie encounter, a climax built around the sass of the newest robot character L3, a ferrous feminist voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. And it’s always interesting, visually, seeing the exotic settings, exotic costumes and tech of this universe. Visiting Lando’s cape closet is a hoot.

The rest of the time the accountants, Disney and Howard himself seemed to say, “OK, we’ve achieved adequate,” which gives the viewer a sense of relief that it’s not worse. Since we aren’t seeing the original directors’ vision, just their (and J.J. Abrams’ casting), we can only guess how bad things were going beforehand.

But “adequate” is not what we want or expect from a “Star Wars” story.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi action/violence

Cast:Alden Ehrenreich, Donald Glover, Emilia Clarke, Wood Harrelson, Thandie Newton, paul Bettany

Credits:Directed by Ron Howard, script by Jonathan Kasdan, Lawrence Kasdan. A Disney/Lucasfilms release.

Running time:  2:15

It’s about the run-up to the Iraq invasion, it stars Tommy Lee Jones, Jessica Biel, Milla Jovovich, James Marsden, Woody Harrelson and Rob Reiner, who also directed it.

Yes, Reiner’s an outspoken liberal and thus a critic of Bush and his ilk. And no, he’s not really a filmmaking heavyweight any more. Vertical Entertainment is not one of the major studios.

But there are names here, and it’s a journalism tale that seems theatrical. Maybe. Just a bit.

July 13, we find out if that’s true. 

Et tu, Netflix?

Here I am, trying to track down “The Quiller Memorandum,” and you don’t have the rights/bandwidth capacity to be the World’s Greatest Repository of 100 years of Feature Films. But you’re spending money on another GD zombie movie?

That’s all “Cargo” is. We’ve seen scores of variations of this tale, a family avoiding “the infected,” this time in Australia’s Outback, making fateful, sacrificial choices when the infection gets into the family.

Zombies even have their own soap opera on TV, “The Walking/Boring Dead.” Shot in Georgia. Australia, at least, is photogenic.

It’s a road picture, like “The Road,” with Martin Freeman playing the heroic dad who tries to get his toddler into the hands of somebody “still people” after his wife dies and he fears the worst in himself.

Speaking of Australian journey-quest narratives, why isn’t “Rabbit-Proof Fence,” a near-masterpiece, on Netflix? Or “Walkabout?” Never mind.

“Cargo” takes Freeman, as Andy, down the remote rivers, scavenging to provide for wife Kay (Susie Porter) and baby Rosie, until that day Kay is bitten. It’s the Even More post-Apocalyptic Every Man for Himself Future that’s replaced the post Apocalyptic Every Man for Himself present, so even the happy family family you see celebrating a birthday ashore has a gun-brandishing “Move ALONG, stranger” demeanor.

That’s OK. Maybe a croc or something bit Kay.

“It had FINGERS, Andy!”

With every bite, we reset the 48 hour clock before the zombie turns. It’s a FitBit countdown. And so we’ve got another ticking clock zombie thriller where you try to save the uninfected and Civilization Itself before the infected one is lost.

Kay gets the stakes and is resigned to what is coming. Andy? He wants to find a town, and a hospital. As if there’s any hope of either of those in “Road Warrior with Zombies Land.

He meets a former teacher (Kris McQuade), an aboriginal girl (Simone Landers) still feeding captured game to his zombie dad, and a survivalist (Anthony Hayes) and his ladyfriend (Caren Pistorious) who show just how low humanity will sink, and how fast, when everything breaks down.

Except for the One Truck to Survive the Apocalypse, as seen in SO Many Movies — 1990s vintage Jeep Cherokees. Hey, I drove two of them over 200,000 miles. I agree with that cliche.

The Aboriginal “old ways” are celebrated, in that patronizing way movies have of indulging indigenous patois, closeness to nature and Native People are Magic ethos.

Freeman gives a little something to moments of angst. But seriously. Yawn.

It’s a movie so familiar in its tropes, storybeats and dialogue that it feels like a half-forgotten picture or TV show you’ve already seen. The makeup is often “Walking Dead” mediocre.

If you’re watching it, why? If you’re reading this, consider yourself warned.

And if you work for Netflix, seriously, “Rabbit Proof Fence.” There’s a whole world of truly “original” cinema that no one saw in theaters and most have missed on Netflix. Maybe stick to trying teen comedies. At least that’s a niche nobody else is flooding the market with.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic, bloody violence, disturbing images.

Cast: Martin Freeman, Susie Parker, Simone Landers, Anthony Hayes, Caren Pistorius, Kris McQuade

Credits:Directed by Ben Howling, Yolanda Ramke script by Yolanda Ramke. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

First impressions matter, and Natalie Dormer’s was a corker.

The British bombshell first gained notice as Anne Boleyn in TV’s “The Tudors,”  insatiable, scheming, the encyclopedic picture of “man eater.”

It’s an image that’s followed her, for good or ill, ever since. Rare is the film where a Dormer appearance doesn’t involve her fixing her wide blue eyes into “FETCH” mode, and whatever man falls under her gaze, be he racing driver James Hunt (“Rush”) or Captain America, cannot resist, even if he senses the spider’s web she weaves.

She toys with that ferocious baggage in the thriller “In Darkness,” dialing down the allure as a blind London film score pianist, all demure attire, independence and solitude. But something tells us there’s more to this woman than “victim,” when she comes under threat after her neighbor (tabloid and gossip-site queen Emily Ratjakowski) dies.

Dormer co-wrote the script for this overly-complicated tale of war crimes, trauma and seeing both the menace of being hunted and the obstacles of everyday London life through the eyes of the blind.

Irish-born TV director Anthony Byrne (“Mr. Selfridge,” “Ripper Street,” “Peaky Blinders”) co-wrote the script and makes this a tale told with images, extreme close-ups of clues, faces, hazards and violence. We “see” what Sofia (Dormer) cannot. But her London flat’s poor soundproofing lets her “see” the arguments going on upstairs, and when her Serbian neighbor (Ratjakowski) falls to her death.

The too-chatty Detective/Inspector (Neil Maskell) asks her the commonly held misconception that movies about the blind are all built upon.

“Is it true that the loss of one sense sharpens the others?”

Sofia won’t confirm that, but we sense her overhearing conversations, picking up on the dead woman’s perfume, making her way even when she’s forced to exit the London Underground at an unfamiliar station.

And we hear the gun-metal CLACK/CLICK of her unfolding her seeing-eye cane, a woman with purpose and spine and an agenda of her own.

There’s a man following her (Ed Skrein of “The Transporter Refueled” and “Kill Your Friends”). Whatever the dead neighbor had, he wants it. Whatever happened to her, he’s involved. And he’s under the thumb of somebody even more ruthless (Joely Richardson).

But he cannot let anything happen to her until he’s got that Hitchcockian “MacGuffin.” 

And then there’s the dead neighbor’s father, an alleged Serbian war criminal (Jan Bijvoet), constantly on the news, fighting extradition and street protesters who want him to face justice.

“In Darkness” is a puzzle picture that keeps adding twists, some of which are smartly foreshadowed, others that come out of the blue. It’s a film that could have been better served had it stopped at “just smart enough.” But Byrne keeps the tension up and the camera tight on Dormer, who lets us see the wheels turning in Sofia’s “dead stare,” and suggests there are cards she’s hiding, cards she has yet to play.

One tasty moment transpires in a women’s restroom, answering the question “How do the blind always keep their hair, clothes and makeup so perfect in the movies?”

Sofia asks the (supposedly unknown to her) villainess (Richardson), “How do I look?”

“Like a Million dollars!”

“Nice shoes,” the blind-woman cracks back to her rival, prompting the viewer to match Richardson’s demonic cackle, note for note.

There have been many better movies that set out to show us how the blind see the world — the thriller “Blink,” and the drama “Blindness,” come to mind. And there are so many twists here that they get in the way of each other, diluting the logic of this possible outcome, or that one.

But Dormer locks our attention in, and makes us root for Sofia, whatever her motives might be.

It’s just that we know, from the moment we see her, what those poor menfolk sharing the screen do not. There’s a meal coming up, and the maneater always locks eyes on the main course.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, explicit sexual content

Cast: Natalie Dormer, Ed Skein, Emily Ratajkowski, Jan Bijvoet, Neil Maskell and Joely Richardson

Credits:Directed by Anthony Byrne, script by Anthony Byrne and Natalie Dormer. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:41

The French street artist JR (Jean-Rene…something) takes evocative photographs, blows them and plasters them on walls, alleys, rooftops — public spaces. Think of a more sentimental Banksy, somebody whose work is more about delight than provocation.

Agnés Varda is one of the last survivors of French cinema’s Nouevelle Vague/New Wave, a quixotic figure who has made few well-known films (“One Sings, the Other Doesn’t,” “Vagabond”) and highly-personal essay documentaries (“The Beaches of Agnés”) in her 60 years behind the camera.

They made an odd couple, the 30something hipster who looks a little like a young Elvis Costello, and the diminutive 88 year-old garden gnome of world cinema. But they prove to be an adorable, productive pair as they set out to photograph and install an unconventional moveable feast of installation art in “Faces Places,” the Oscar-nominated documentary.

More evocatively titled “Visages Villages” in French — And doesn’t EVERYthing sound better in French? — the idea was to visit villages and remote corners of France, find interesting canvases to park JR’s images on, and then find the right faces to use in these gigantic posters.

The pair of them travel in a van with a giant camera photo plastered on its sides, joke, reminisce (in Varda’s case), challenge and gently prod each other. It’s most JR’s show, but Varda is here to ask questions, suggest images and locations and plead with the photographer to take his omnipresent sunglasses off.

It’s not the most consequential of films, but from first stop to almost the last, it’s a trippy, traveling delight. They meet Jeanine, the last holdout in a once thriving/now abandoned mining village, and have the brainstorm of collecting old photos from retired miners or their descendants, blowing them up and postering the empty row houses where they used to live.

A farmer’s barn evokes a traditional French profession, but the one-man farm tells the story of how the work has become mechanized, computerized and super-efficient. Put his picture on the barn. A pretty waitress is blown up to cover an entire wall of this village, a famous photographer graces that fallen German cliffside blockhouse.

From Clerence to Bemieux and assort “Saint” this-or-that, Varda laments “It feels like my last” film, JR pooh-poohs her, and takes inspiration from her reminiscences. They visit graveyards and the old homes of old friends, rummage through her old photos, postcards and the photos of those they meet, and search for her old pal and New Wave icon Jean-luc Goddard.

They meet dock-workers, bell-ringers, retirees and goatherds.

Why do they do this? “For fun,” Agnés bubbles, in French with English subtitles.

It’s a pity this didn’t win the Oscar, but there are few documentaries of recent years that make you crave a travel guide to plan your next trip to France. These out of the way places, with their tattered remains (in most cases) of giant face posters adorning public walls, show us a France far away from the tourist TV shows or the movies.

MPAA Rating: PG for brief nude images and thematic elements

Cast: Agnes Varda, JR

Credits:Directed by JR, Agnes Varda. A Cohen Media Group release.

Running time: 1:29

Yes, “Deadpool 2” had the second highest pre-release ticket sales in presales history, yes, it is opening to $132 million — a new R-rated record for R-rated times.

No, “Book Club” didn’t erupt, but it did a nice, grandmotherly $13-16 million. 

And nobody held much hope for “Show Dogs,” which has almost zero laughs in it. I saw it with an audience of kids and parents. So quiet you could hear a chihuahua fart in that theater. It managed $5 million and change.

“I Feel Pretty” and “Black Panther” and “Tully” have tumbled out of the top ten.

The big question I had this weekend was about the Dueling Icon Documentaries.

“RBG,” the Ruth Bader Ginsburg hagiography, and the even less critical “Pope Francis: A Man of his Word” are on almost exactly the same number of screens, with “RBG” on about 30 more. But the film about her has already been in theaters over two weeks.

“RBG” still managed, according to Deadline.com, to crack the top ten, almost doubling the take of Focus Features’ Wim Wenders Pope doc. Maybe the Top Ten call is premature (see Box Office Mojo’s dailies), but the Pope picture still got Ginsburned.

Was there outreach to Catholics for the Francis film? I heard of none. Maybe including the infamous John Boehner’s introduction of him to the GOP Congress in the trailers was a mistake.

Perhaps it would help if the Pope, a sweet-spirited, humorous man, from all accounts, had a “Saturday Night Life” and pop culture doppelganger, something akin to the “Notorious RBG.”

Oh, the Dog Days of late August. Studios dump movies that couldn’t hack it in summer, couldn’t break free of the pack in fall.

But this twisted Muppets go Blue in a Melissa McCarthy murder mystery is “No ‘Sesame, All Street'”

“The Happytime Murders” co-stars Joel McHale and of course, Maya Rudolph. And looks absolutely filthy.

Jim Henson is gnawing at the walls of his coffin over all this Muppet Jazz, where jazz is spelled with an “i.”

August 17, will “Sausage Party” repeat itself?

Roger and Kim had a dram or two when we were in Windsor last fall.

Since its release in 1975, the Maysles Brother’s documentary about genteel decay and madness, “Grey Gardens,” has been celebrated as one of the great films of the genre.

It’s inspired an award-winning HBO dramatic film and a Broadway musical. It’s not just a “cult” film any more, but in some ways it remains one. Devotees of it cannot get enough of this story of Kennedy-connected old money, living in squalor and isolation in the Hamptons of the 1970s.

That’s the audience — “completists” of the tale of Big Edie and Little Edie Bouvier Beale — that the new documentary “That Summer” is for. There was more footage of the mother and daughter, their almost-ruined 14 room, two story estate in East Hampton. And that’s what Danish filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson has gotten his hands on.

“Grey Gardens” had a complicated birth. As the years have passed, the Maysles brothers, David and Albert, got the lion’s share of the credit for one of the great “cinema verite” documentaries ever. But others shot footage and “directed” the film, and are on its credits, at least on IMDb — Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer.

Then there were the origins of the project. Socialite and Jackie Kennedy Onassis sister Lee Radziwill had the idea of documenting the “vanishing” world of the Hamptons, then sparsely populated with a mix of old timers and old money. Her Bouvier cousins (she and Jackie were born Bouvier) were the most fascinating characters living there.

And her pal, the old money artist/photographer Peter Beard, was just the guy to capture that world, and her aunt and cousin, struggling against local authorities to live the way they saw fit, in their own trash and cat-strewn, overgrown fantasy bubble — Grey Gardens.

The Radziwill/Beard project was abandoned, but two of the cinematographers — the Maysles Brothers — came back on their own, zeroed in on the mother and daughter with their cameras, and found a masterpiece in their Dickensian lives of limited opportunities lost in the creepiest co-dependency this side of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”

What this hour or so of new pre-“Grey Gardens” footage, narrated by Beard and Radziwill, does is humanize the Beales to a greater extent, and strip away some of the sadness of “Grey Gardens.”

It’s not really organized, and is left in the rough shape whoever was hanging onto it kept it in. But through “That Summer,” we gain a deeper understanding, not just of the co-dependency, but of how the Beales got there.

The artist Beard is introduced, his fame, travels and work in art photography, collage, fashion and travel shots. Then he sets up this world, where Warhol weekended and Mick and Bianca and the swinging set from the City got away to the then-sleepy Hamptons, seemingly forgotten since “The Great Gatsby” era.

He recalls what a delight the Beales were, how each “fun” visit was nothing like “work” and how they “selfishly explored the amazing thing we had in front of us,” Grey Gardens. He keeps blurting out, then and now, “Francis Bacon,” conjuring up the artist who might have inspired this canvas.

Radziwill, interviewed for a separate project (by Sofia Coppola) weighs in as a second narrator. She commissioned the original project and is in much of the original footage, talking with her relatives, gently cajoling and persuading them to allow plumbers in, and electricians and painters and cleaning crews.

Radziwill, a one-time princess, got her brother-in-law Aristotle Onassis to finance the clean-up of the house, done in baby steps to avoid upsetting the Beales. She comes off as a thin, beautiful ’70s socialite with endless reserves of empathy and concern for her relatives, so any suggestion that she killed the project and sat on the footage out of embarrassment seems an overreach.

We hear Little Edie mention Thoreau and introspective Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau as possible justifications for how she and her mother live, which reminds us that Little Edie went to Harvard. Well, that and their Brahmin accents.

But the simpler explanation, one I don’t recall “Grey Gardens” ever suggesting, is how difficult it would have been for two old money/lost money women of their generation, with no real experience of labor, to get their garbage disposed of, their house repaired and maintained. “Edie never was much for dusting,” her mother cracks, as we see the “Great Expectations” piano and parlor, covered in dust, the ceiling partly collapsed around it.

The clutter and disarray never seems to phase them (and isn’t as pronounced as it was in “Grey Gardens”).

“What are you looking for?” we hear the mother complain.

“What am I ALWAYS looking for, either my pants or my makeup.”

Later, it’s the phone that’s gone missing. Not a cellphone, remember, one that’s been attached to a wire to a wall…somewhere. For decades.

Little Edie can be bubbly, or angry. She fumes at the life she wanted, at the promise that was long ago lost.

“It’s very cruel to dig up the past.  Where is privacy today? I never had any privacy in my whole life.”

Maybe you shouldn’t have “had incest with your uncle,” Big Edie cracks.

And everything that “Grey Gardens” once suggested is re-confirmed, a cruel co-dependent relationship of singing, cat-fancying ice-cream junkies, living and bickering in a house where the electricity had failed and each devolved into the other’s entire world.

It’s easy to draw a through-line connecting these two women to the birth of reality TV, especially when you recall that a Radziwill daughter is one of the “Real Housewives of New York.” The shallow pretension, putting on airs and in-breeding goes back generations, darling.

The lack of organization keeps this from being a complete film, or a great one. “That Summer” is a footnote to “Grey Gardens.” But for those wholly engrossed in the history, the tragedy and the “real Beales,” before “Grey Gardens” set their personas in stone and made them immortal, it’s a fascinating artifact and another piece of the puzzle of who they were before the caricatures took over.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Edith Bouvier Beale, Peter Beard, Edith ‘Little Edie’ Bouvier Beale, Lee Radziwill, Andy Warhol

Credits:Directed by Göran Hugo Olsson . An IFC/Sundance Selects release.

Running time: 1:21

Fox’s projections for what “Deadpool 2” might do on its opening weekend appear to be right on the mark.

A huge Thursday night and a record-setting (beating “It”) Friday of over $53 million have the film on track to clear the $130 million mark, exactly where Fox analysts said it would end up.

It’s rated R, so theoretically there’s less of a potential family audience. Plenty of “Violence? Cussing? So what?” parents are out there, but that’s the logic behind why this latest Marvel money maker won’t do “Avengers” or “Black Panther” numbers.

Lower expectations help. It could still eclipse this Deadline.com projection, as Friday AM, Deadline was just CERTAIN it would hit $150, but that seems unlikely, despite the staggering Friday. It’ll beat “It” and that’ll have to do, Mr. Lively.

Deadline — always dead wrong on Thursday night, less wrong the rest of the weekend. But they’re the only ones to “call” the weekend early, so a 10-25% margin of error will have to do for those of us looking for early word on “the numbers.”

“Book Club” is sliding in closer to a more reasonable $15-16 million, despite what pre-weekend online sales were suggesting. It takes a while for older audiences to get the word and get out the door to this Seniors in Spanx romantic comedy.

“Show Dogs” won’t clear $6.  Meh.