All the summer’s parties: A Solo journey through recent cinema

So far it’s been a busy summer of dross pedaling rehashes, reboots and remodellings. Over the course of the next few weeks your correspondent will counter intuitively recount why he’ll remember it all fondly, if only for the amount of alcohol and self loathing it’s taken to sustain so many trips to his local mainstream cinema. He’ll always look back on this period with sepia tinged nostalgia and the chances are, if you care about cinema, you will too.

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The weather was passable and Gareth Southgate’s plucky boys were riding the frothing wave of baseless, unrealistic optimism to missed opportunity beach. The percentage of time spent in beer gardens wondering whether it really will be alright in the end rose dramatically. Holidays were had, trips to the city, picnics of scotched egg and mustard on mild and occasionally wild evenings. I needed respite. I was getting carried away. Regularly lunching out of doors and feeding a fifty story fever of frenzied delight over the quality of English set piece delivery had left me too closely exposed to an idyll. One that was threatening to spark myself and others around me into actual raptures. I was uneasily tussling with the very real possibility of a few months of positivity and genuine optimism sprouting in a world that increasingly resembles a strangely crumbly, moulding loaf.

I needed to pare things back. Seek refuge in degrading base pursuits. Take some rough with the smooth, endure a few regrettable lows to really enjoy the highs. I stopped taking my glass back to the bar. I’d enjoy a yoghurt before restoring balance by leaving the dairy flecked spoon on the side for others to curse. Parks began to fill with scotched crumb almost as rapidly as my belly did with ale. Confident I’d restored some balance to the universe I accepted an invitation to the biggest party of the summer.

Han and friends were heading off on an epic adventure to the stars in Solo: A Star Wars Story. ‘There’ll be horseplay’, they said. Unconvinced and slightly confused about why they’d decided to launch into another gallop across their cinematic universe, so soon after the last one, they screamed, ‘Aw, come! There’ll be laser rifles and waistcoats!’. I turned the possibility over in my head, my subconscious trying to talk me out of it. When’s the last bus? Do you take vodka and doritos or a battle ready vibrostaff? Ahem. Over the course of an overzealous pub lunch I decided to live a little. I’d insulted an old lady and spat on a cat earlier in the day, so with the daily moral roughage taken care of I could sample the smooth. Join the party I told myself. Chewbacca’s bringing wings and Lando makes a mean punch.

A rumoured $275 million had been spent getting things together. There had been, and would be, inarguably bigger parties that had, and would, garner more public attention than this but Han’s bash dwarfed them in terms of cost*. Everyone had chipped in. The newly joined Disney and Lucas houses had teamed up and they were flush. The venues were massive and people had been turning up in their droves just to see what the hell was going on. ‘Does that girl from down the road really have a brother who can levitate and bend cutlery with his mind?’. After an absence of a few years they’d started throwing these space themed get-togethers again and things had been going down pretty well. Nobody ever claimed they’d had the night of their lives at these things but after so long away people were just glad to see all the old gang, and some new faces, together in the same place again.

However, warm receptions and the odd kind word led someone to get a little carried away whilst they were marking up the 2018 calendar. ‘Once a year we’ll meet up for this’, they said to begin with, ‘we’ll go big at the end of every year, have a blowout’. Illusions of grandeur clouded their judgement. ‘More people are having their party’s in the summer’, they observed, ‘LETS HAVE ANOTHER ONE! WE CAN PULL IT OFF!’.

Argh. The stakes are higher at this time of year. The competition is ruthless and strong. You don’t start throwing money at a summer party unless you know it’s going to win big, you have to pull it out of the bag. There’s a party down the park with dinosaur models and lots of shouting. Tom Cruise often has one and he starts swinging from lighting fixtures and running barefoot over the gas hobs when he’s pissed.

Days flew by as I stuck with my new mantra of enjoyable deeds tempered with arseholery. It was working, I wasn’t waking up in good moods everyday and I thought about things other than the world cup. I set my enjoyable intent blasters to moderate and confirmed I’d be attending Han’s bash. Like an x-wing through a slipstream the day-of was quick to arrive.

The party had been going for well over two weeks by the time I found my way there. I took a seat in the corner with my vibrostaff and waited for the good times to start a-rollin’. It didn’t take long to notice a bit of paper taped to the wall. Crudely scrawled on it was a list:

• red cups

• beer pong

• droid darts

• lightsabers to slice lemons for drinks

My excitement peaked. Thrill ride inbound. It was only afterwards I noticed what was written on the reverse:

• mild jeopardy, never build to anything ‘suspenseful’

• characterisation, thin. Make tracing paper look like heavy gauged steel

• space cowboys

The two lists about summed the whole affair up. Organising this wasn’t exactly a stroll through a rose garden. That classic trope ‘troubled production’ featuring prominently in write ups. Much like the last space party Rogue One the journey from gestation to fruition was fraught but that’s where the comparison between these two films ends.

Out of a fractious birth the rogueish one was able to frame the Star Wars universe a little differently, free from the shackles of expectation it was treated as an outsider from the start and was allowed to buck constricting conventions. Lord and Miller, the original captains of this ill fated starship, were said to have wanted a film that reflected the maverick spirit of its lead character. Rogue Two, if you like. However, much like Edgar Wright tussling with Marvel Studios over his vision for Ant Man, the evil empire tried to curb their vision and forced choked the duo out of the control room and into an emergency escape pod destined for the sun.

Ron Howard, the director who was drafted in to keep things on the rails after Lord and Miller were jettisoned, talked up Solo as a safe summer spectacular. A family friendly smash that was going to tick all the light entertainment boxes. He spoke of his love of classic gunslinger tv shows and a reverence for the franchise. You could practically see the sticky tape and various shades of beige paint kept close at hand to try and give things an uncontroversial and respectable sheen.

Everything was fine, absolutely fine. This fucked me off. If it’s not good, you're hoping for a gutter scraping failure. A failure so momentous it can be seen from the outer rim. This was neither, it looked okay, the acting was okay and Ron was sat there, smug grin under his baseball cap, sipping his mediocre on ice. 'On these mean streets, a young man must fight for survival, but he yearns to fly to the stars', the screen scroll tells us. We all do and we all expect this dirge of a journey you're inevitably going to take us on to be enjoyable in some way, but it's not.

He's not a rogue, his quips aren't funny and he's not dangerous enough. That's not to pour scorn on Alden Ehrenreich's performance. He does an admirable job of a least attempting to make chicken salad out of the chicken shit he's been given. Behind the disarming charm and snappy retorts of Ford's Solo there was a menace. He's a thief, a murderer and such exploits put him in positions where he has to be pitiless and maybe even cruel. A PC family space-opera doesn't provide the narrative scaffolding that one would need to effectively tell the story of this man. Maybe the original portrayal was tainted by the unpalatable whiff of 70s masculinity, a seedy and regrettable thing, but that doesn't give someone recourse to ignore it and that portion of the character should be fleshed out here whether or not someone in a committee room feels it might 'alienate key demographics' or whatever monotonous tripe they might spew. With every banal one-liner and every narrow escape from non-jeopardy studio execs could be seen high fiving and dancing, dancing on the childhood memories of the masses. Fat corporate Jabba the Huts, eyes spread hungrily wide, waiting for the cash that would never come, believing they’d duped the fans with a pristine Millennium Falcon when they’d painted up an old landspeeder from a piece of waste ground near the studio car park.

I emerged from the darkness of the party. Incandescent with rage and with a vice like grip on the handle of my vibrostaff ready to strike down some innocents. They had used the good name of the franchise to rope me into giving them my money. I paused, no amount of scotched crumb, yoghurt speckled spoons and projectile saliva in the faces of the feline and the elderly could possibly match the negative karma generated by making the ill fated decision to accept this invitation. The only way to restore balance to the universe would be to put down the vibrostaff and forget this whole ordeal.

Once I arrived home I had calmed. I opened a beer and set about purging the memories of Ron Howard and the waistcoats from my mind. Lord, the waistcoats, there were so many. My genuflection was interrupted. A canister smashed through a window and after ricocheting off the walls it eventually, in a wake of broken china, settled on the floor. I opened it, plumes of smoke began to rise, a voice broke through...

‘This is Tom Cruise. Guess what? I’m having a party. Consider this an invite. I need to know numbers for nibbles, so your mission, if you chose to accept it, is to respond ASAP. This message will self destruct in five seconds’.

I threw it out of the window, settled down on the sofa and opened another beer. I’d let Tom know I was turning up in the morning. Outside, Ron Howard caught what he thought was a ball. Seconds later, all that remained was a pile of money, a baseball cap and a fucking waistcoat. His demise brought to mind a pithy exchange between Lando and Han, one of the only redeemable bits of dialogue from this whole ill advised, financially driven charade and one that could just as easily be between any viewer and the bastards at the studio who served us this fiduciary shredding slime...

'I hate you'

'I know'

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The cruise continues soon...

*the exception being a group of guys calling themselves Avengers who have parties too often. They broke my spirit and willingness to attend years ago by inviting Robert Downey Jr every fucking time.