The rise and fall of Alden Ehrenreich

When was the last time being cast as Han Solo made somebody less famous?

Trick question! Only two people have ever been cast as Han Solo, and we certainly know how it worked out for Harrison Ford.

But it's a trick question that does have an answer, which is: 2018, when Solo: A Star Wars Story was released.

Have you heard from Alden Ehrenreich since then?

I haven't. But then again, I didn't watch the 2020 TV series Brave New World. But then again, that's the only thing Ehrenreich has appeared in these past five years.

It makes me almost sorry for having written this post, when Ehrenreich was first cast, and the only thing I'd ever seen him in was the disappointing Coens movie Hail, Caesar! Simply put, I questioned his ascendancy ... and it appears everyone else soon started to do the same.

In fact, until I saw him in the movie that prompted the writing of this post, I had forgotten that I had forgotten him. 

Could it really be that Solo was so underwhelmingly received that it did, indeed, put the brakes on Ehrenreich's career?

I wouldn't have thought so, but I don't know what else to conclude. I did a little light googling to find out if I'd missed some story about how he opted out of the entertainment industry, or had some scandal that got him cancelled, but of course I found nothing.

Well, he clearly hasn't opted out of the industry because he has a starring role in Elizabeth Banks' Cocaine Bear.

And guess what? I really liked him! It was by far my favorite Alden Ehrenreich performance to date.

Sadly, he and O'Shea Jackson Jr. were the only things I really liked about the movie. It had a few very fleeting moments of inspiration, when it approached being the thing I wanted it to be, but then would go back to being about as uninteresting as a movie about a bear addicted to cocaine could ever be.

But I felt myself rooting for Ehrenreich, strangely enough, and feeling good about the fact that he has two more movies set for a release in 2023, one of which is from one of the biggest directors we have: Christopher Nolan. 

Now, there are 13 actors listed a head of him on the cast list for Oppenheimer -- but I guess it's a start.

So maybe this piece should really be called "The rise and fall and rise of Alden Ehrenreich." And maybe now he's coming into the charisma that wowed everyone else, but not me, back when he first came on the scene. 

Disney's unnatural clustering

Have you ever noticed there are periods of time when you feel like you are seeing certain actors in everything? It could of course be that they are blowing up, but sometimes, they're appearing in so many roles that you wonder how it was possible they even did all this work at the same time.

The answer is: They didn't. Because films have different periods of gestation, it's possible you did the work two years ago and it's only just now coming to the big screen. That's how an actor like John C. Reilly appears in The Sisters Brothers, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Holmes & Watson and Stan & Ollie, all released within a period of about four months in 2018. I'm not looking it up to confirm, but I'd bet he shot those over 18 months or more, rather than the intense four-month period their release dates would imply. Reilly himself had no control over when those movies would be released. He just showed up to work.

But a studio has a lot more control over the release of its movies, at least in theory. Often times they establish release dates in advance, then pull whatever strings are necessary to meet those release dates. Sometimes they miss and have to push it back, but for the most part, they don't.

Which is why I think it's so weird that Disney is giving us Dumbo, Aladdin and The Lion King all within 2019, at two-month intervals, starting at the end of this month.

I'm tempted to say it's like releasing three Star Wars movies within the space of five months, but that's not an exact parallel. These movies have nothing to do with each other in terms of story.

However, they are all part of Disney's most clearly delineated new initiative, which is to make live action remakes of most if not all of its classic films. I mean, it probably won't be all -- I doubt we're going to see the Treasure Planet or Home on the Range live action remake any time soon. But isn't that all the more reason to space them out? It's like they want to drain the whole well in 2019, and then move on. Who knows, maybe they do.

It seems hard to imagine that these films won't cannibalize one another in some way, either in terms of providing actual competition for one another or in terms of reducing our overall appetite for watered down CG versions of Disney classics. In North America, competition is not as much of a problem as it may be here in Australia, where movies tend to play longer in theaters.

I imagine these movies are messing with the Australian release strategy for children's movies, which often involves delaying releases to times that coincide with school holidays, which is why we are still waiting another month for the Lego Movie sequel. Dumbo's late March release works perfectly with the upcoming school holidays, which begin on April 5th, but Aladdin's May release can't rightly be pushed back to the end of June for the next school holidays, because The Lion King is hot on its heels.

Whether these movies cause logistical problems for one another, they just don't make sense from a strategy standpoint. You don't want to saturate the market with a particular type of film because the audience will stop considering it special and will kind of implicitly ask you for less of it. If they learned anything from the failure of Solo, maybe it should be that.

Or maybe they just think the appetite is inexhaustible for these live action remakes, as they are serving a different audience. Star Wars geeks rebelled (no pun intended) against the annual release of Star Wars movies, if not actually then implicitly, by not throwing their money at Solo. However, the money has been good for movies like Beauty and the Beast, so maybe either that Solo-type reckoning is still ahead, or will simply never happen.

Or maybe they recognize that the appetite is about to be exhausted, so better churn these out now before the audience definitively turns away from them.

Before I leave you I should probably explain that subject.

"Unnatural clustering" is a useful (if I do say so myself) term I coined in discussion of a phenomenon that occurs when ranking movies on Flickchart. (I can say I "coined it" because it's still used by people on my Flickcharters Facebook group). It refers to what happens when you are ranking movies in filters, as in, all Star Wars movies against each other. It's problematic to do it this way, because if one movie beats the other, it moves one spot ahead of it on the whole chart. In reality, those two films probably do not belong consecutively on your chart, but by forcing similar movies to duel each other, it's created the impression that they have landed naturally next to one another. That may occur in the course of random dueling, but filters force specific duels, and the problem is only worsened if Film C beats Film B, which had beaten Film A, leaving three consecutive Star Wars movies on your chart of potentially thousands of films.

Disney has created its own kind of unnatural clustering by taking three movies that would logically be their own types of tentpoles for the initiative they represent in their own calendar years. Instead, it's just 112 days from the release of the first to the release of the third.

For Disney, it could end up being a clusterfuck.

Better Call Han

No real spoilers.

I won’t go into spoilers on Solo: A Star Wars Story, though there’s only one thing in it that I think qualifies as a genuine surprise that has any bearing on the rest of the Star Wars universe.

I will say that I think the movie is kind of like the cinematic version of Better Call Saul, and that’s not even something I probably needed to see the movie to know.

Like Better Call Saul to Breaking Bad, it gives us a look at the origins of a character we have come to know as a bit of a rapscallion, when he was less of one. Of course, Han Solo is a lot more of an old softy than Saul Goodman a.k.a. Jimmy McGill, and he undergoes a character arc over the course of the original Star Wars trilogy that Saul does not undergo in six seasons of Breaking Bad.

But there’s the same kind of sense in watching it that this cannot end well.

And not just because Han Solo will one day end up on a bridge with a lightsaber through his stomach.

Better Caul Saul goes to great lengths showing us that the man once known as Jimmy was a good guy. I mean, he was always a trickster and he never met a scam he didn’t like, but he lived his life following a certain moral compass. The people he duped were (almost) always deserving of that usury, or at least the ends justified the means. At the end of the day he wanted to do the right thing for people who deserved justice.

But of course, at some point – a point we have not yet reached in the narrative of that TV show – it all came apart.

It’s a similar situation with Han Solo. Now, Han is not as compromised, morally, when we meet him at the start of A New Hope as Saul is when we meet him in Breaking Bad. He’s a bit more of a genuine hero than an anti-hero, whereas Saul isn’t either – he’s essentially just comic relief. We didn’t know then how much we would love him and how much we would thirst for a whole series devoted to him, which in some ways even surpasses the series from which it span off.

But if things had really “gone well” for Han Solo, we wouldn’t first encounter him in a seedy bar on Tatooine, trying to escape his debts to a gangster and the bounty on his head, shooting first on the bounty hunter who tries to take him back as a hostage to that gangster. Hey, I’m sure Greedo had some kids to feed.

And so Solo: A Star Wars Story cannot really end well for him either, though it remains to be seen if they are going to try to squeeze some sequels out of this material. I won’t give away the ending, but you already know it has to be on some kind of downward trajectory, because of something you might not know: Han Solo might also be described as something of an idealist at the start of this movie. Sure, his charm is rakish and his schemes reckless, but we find out in the first five minutes of this movie that what he’s doing, he’s doing for love. Sorry if you think that’s a spoiler, but it’s in the damn first five minutes of the movie.

So the journey with Han, as with Jimmy, is the loss of that idealism, to be replaced by something more jaded and cynical.

And in both cases, there’s a love driving that idealism, a love that is lost. We don’t know what’s going to happen between Jimmy and Kim (please don’t die) because the series hasn’t gotten that far yet. But she makes no appearance in Breaking Bad, so she’s out of the picture in one way or another. And with Han’s love interest in Solo … again not spoiling anything, but let’s just say you already know Han is single when he first meets Princess Leia.

I just hope Jimmy can live long enough to meet someone, have children, and die of a lightsaber wound to the gut.

The mellowing of our Star Wars expectations

Solo: A Star Wars Story opens this week.

Ho hum.

Han Solo is arguably one of the most popular characters in movie history, yet a movie devoted to him is not causing the stir we have come to expect, especially from Star Wars movies.

I think this says more about the state of Star Wars movies than it does about Han Solo.

Forget the “troubled production,” about which the average person likely knows diddly squat. Also forget whether the previous movies have been good, because some people have loved each of the three newest Star Wars movies and some people have loathed them. There isn’t one that can be acknowledged generally as a turd, the way the prequels were.

But we are now in our fourth straight year with a Star Wars movie, and we’ve just mellowed out on all this hype and other tangential buzz. Which is both inevitable and a bit disappointing.

Even 18 months ago, when Rogue One was released, I made sure I was there at a midnight screening. Actually, I think the midnight screening was necessitated by the fact that I needed to record a podcast about it two nights later, and had to be sure I’d get to see it before then. If something terrible happened and I missed the screening, I’d have time to compensate with another showing before the podcast recorded. But I suspect I would have been drawn to that midnight screening anyway.

What Rogue One and Solo have in common is that they are both prequels, meaning certain characters were guaranteed to escape them alive. Spoilers were not the big factor they might be in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.

What they don’t have, or seem to have, in common is the hype leading up to them.

For one, I noticed that they already screened Solo for critics. My editor has already written and posted his review, even though the first public screenings are still nearly 32 hours off as I write this. For the previous three movies, they wouldn’t show anybody the movie until about six hours before those midnight screenings were set to happen. My editor beat the rest of us plebes to the screening, but only by a short time, barely even enough to brag.

Then I noticed the relative paucity of midnight screenings tomorrow. At the Village Cinema at Crown Casino, where I have started to go for my big budget movies on large screens, there’s only a single midnight screening, and it’s actually at 12:15. Hoyts, the other option for big screens, does have three screens showing the movie at 12:01, but only three, and only once each. When The Last Jedi came out last year, I’m pretty sure it played a good 20 times before weary Hoyts theater staff got to go to bed that night.

Again, I don’t think it’s the fault of Han Solo. But I do think Rogue One makes a good point of comparison, as these both have the “A Star Wars Story” label on them. Just 18 months ago, people were hungry enough for more Star Wars, any Star Wars, to line up for a midnight showing, even when they knew that nothing they didn’t already basically know would happen in the movie. Now, not so much.

You could argue that the narrative of stealing the Death Star plans is inherently more interesting than watching Han Solo on just some random adventure, though I’m sure the movie will do its darnedest to convince us of the stakes of this particular adventure. But I really don’t think so. Solo allows us to explore a beloved character – three beloved characters, actually – while Rogue One focused on characters we didn’t know and only hinted at a few we already did. (We knew Darth Vader was going to be in it, and we probably thought that was going to be cool, but I don’t think it could be described as the film’s primary draw.)

What I really think is that this is the first sign of our Star Wars fatigue, the fact that a new movie is coming out this week and only in the past day or two did I even start to think about my intended strategy for seeing it. Basically, I don’t think I’ll need one. It’ll be playing enough, with few enough total people seeing it, that I’ll probably be able to just roll up to the theater on Thursday night and use my critics card to snare a ticket. (I am going to see it in its first 24 hours – I haven’t mellowed that much.) But I also am not that worried if I go and it’s sold out. A need to see it does not feel desperate. Too bad, because it should.

I guess I partly blame Rogue One, as I didn’t really care for it and it demonstrated to me that the characters I knew probably played more of a role in my affections than I wanted to acknowledge. Or maybe these particular characters were just lame. Or maybe they turned the stealing of the Death Star plans into an epic battle the likes of which would be discussed in history books, when it should have been a cloak and dagger mission. But now I’m getting sidetracked.

I blame Rogue One more as the first sign of the new normal in the Star Wars universe, where after 2019 we will continue to get Star Wars movies but they will each be a bit more shrug-worthy than the one that preceded them. Once the Skywalker saga is (presumably) over next year, each new Star Wars movie will be a Solo, with increasingly fewer midnight screenings, increasingly less urgency over how soon we see it, and increasingly fewer characters we care about.

I don’t totally mind the mellowing, mind you. That day after the midnight screening is always rough, and my this Thursday at work thanks me in advance.

But there’s something I’ll miss about the excitement of Star Wars, which reduced my capacity for rational thought and just turned me into a fanboy.

I guess I’ll get one more shot with Episode IX next year.

In the meantime … Alden Ehrenreich, eh? I still wish they’d gone with Anthony Ingruber.

Boy to man

Donald Glover is already having a big month of May, and Solo: A Star Wars Story hasn’t even come out yet.

One of the biggest viral phenomena in ages – if that’s the right way to refer to it – is Glover’s new song and video “This is America,” which already has nearly 55 million views on YouTube at the time I’m writing these words, a number that will likely increase by five million by the time I actually publish. And it only came out like five days ago.

It’s all anyone’s talking about, or so I assume, as I don’t hang out on Facebook like I once did or on Twitter like I never did.

Only 24 hours after watching it (three times) did I even realize that Glover was the artist on the song. In fact, I did not even know he rapped.

The song is released by Childish Gambino, a name I’d heard, as had my wife. Neither of us realized it was an alter ego for Glover himself. I saw Glover dancing in the video, and his mouth moving to the words – he grooves through a warehouse as all sorts of outlandish things happen, though I don’t need to tell you because you have no doubt already watched it. But I thought Glover was doing kind of a Christopher Walken in “Weapon of Choice,” not actually doing the rapping himself. I thought he was just putting a celebrity face on the lacerating lyrics that wrestle with the place of black people in today’s America, in a way that’s oblique enough not to be pedantic.

But no, that’s Glover, rapping and dancing and running for his life in the chilling final ten seconds of the video.

And getting a nation, even a world, talking.

That’s a long way to have come for the boy who started out as very much of a boy.

It was impossible to do anything other than infantilize Glover on Community, as he played a guy who was essentially a nerd despite his good looks and athletic abilities. He was best friends with Abad (Danny Pudi), a nerd so aggressively nerdish that he was either actually on the spectrum, or on it for all intents and purposes. Their interactions involved the fetishization of geek culture, and often consisted of role-playing, larping, or other activities traditionally associated with arrested development.

Glover’s years since Community ended have entailed a fairly rapid maturation toward adulthood.

I’ve only watched one episode of Atlanta, which I watched on a plane, hoping to be able to pick up the rest of the series at some point. That hope has ultimately gone frustrated, as I’ve never subscribed to the right services to easily find it (and didn’t like the one episode enough to go out of my way to pay for it). But I immediately noticed the change in Glover. Not only was this not a jokey role at all – the one episode I saw, anyway – but it reflected a conscious choice to trade in his nerd bonafides for something more clearly hip and stylish. The difference seemed to be how much he was “trying,” which also indicated his range as an actor. Troy Barnes was a very try-hard type of role, as the comedy in Community was broad, and everyone needed to play to the back row. Atlanta represented something entirely different – a human-scale rap drama (do I have that right?) in which Earnest Marks was the coolest cat on the screen. I’m sure Glover does more with that character than I’m suggesting, and I’d be able to tell you what it is if I’d seen more episodes. But either way it’s meant to be a compliment.

His movie roles have not been an abandonment of his geek affiliations by any means. One is a movie about male strippers, Magic Mike XXL, in which I should clearly have realized he has the ability to rap, as that’s what he does. (More spoken word, maybe, if I remember correctly.) But then it’s been The Martian and Spider-Man: Homecoming, both very genre, or at least genre adjacent. I actually don’t remember him in Spider-Man: Homecoming, but in The Martian he plays a bit of a frazzled genius trying to figure out how to save an astronaut stranded on Mars. It’s also a different role from Troy Barnes, a step toward adulthood, which was appropriate as he was in his early 30s at the time.

Lando Calrissian is kind of a mixture of both. Yes, being in a Star Wars movie obviously means Glover is still steeped in geek culture. However, even a young version of Lando is a debonair motherfucker. The charm of Lando is an inherently adult type of charm, and you wouldn’t cast someone in this role unless he was pretty capable of demonstrating a certain type of maturity. He looks pretty regal in that cape, or robe, or whatever it is.

The “This is America” video is really what made me sit up and take notice of how far Glover has come in the persona he projects. He may not be playing the role of a rapper in this video, as it turns out he is actually that guy, but he is playing a role. The choice of his outfit is meant to tell you what that is, as well as the gray in his beard, which might even be artificial (he could be a greybeard at 34, but probably not).

I’m a little hesitant to write this next paragraph because I’m concerned about being misconstrued. If I’ve misunderstood what Glover is doing in this video, it could make me part of the problem rather than part of the solution. But it seems to me that he’s playing a role defined by white America’s view of him, not his own self-perception or presentation of self. By choosing to wear his bear long and scraggly (with that fleck of gray), and by opting for no shirt, and by making that crazy expression he’s making in the shot featured above, Glover seems to be playing the role of “crazy drunk black guy a white cop might accidentally shoot.” He’s not the geek from Community. He’s not the hip and street smart producer from Atlanta. He’s a 54-year-old welfare recipient drunk on malt liquor. And it’s only one of the buttons he’s pushing in this engrossing and eminently rewatchable video.

Glover seems not to be so much rejecting his status as a boy, but rejecting the way he was once an easy pill for white America to swallow. It’s no secret that the fans of Community were largely white males, even with not one but two African-American main characters, which means it managed to exceed the requirements of tokenism. Glover’s involvement in the show, and particularly the role he played, made him a comfortable type of black person for whites to like. He was “one of the good ones.”

Now, Glover wants to show us he’s not that. He’s as much of a part of our conversation on race as anyone in the culture is. In fact, in very real and profound ways, he’s driving that conversation.

Which is a pretty damn adult thing to be doing.