SOLO - A RED LETTER MEDIA REVIEW

Ugh, Half in the Bag is somehow worse than the Plinkett garbage.

At least, even with Plinkett's ridiculous overreactions to stuff, he was sometimes funny.

HitB is just a cringefest.

 

I don't really have much to say to the interview that I haven't addressed elsewhere (in terms of cinematography, story, and pacing), but one part that bothered me was their portion of discussing the Parsec.

It's often stated that Lucas wrote parsec because he thought it was a measure of time and it was a mistake that had to be retconned over time.
The problem actually wasn't with Lucas at all.

From the script:

HAN
It's the ship that made the Kessel
run in less than twelve parsecs!

Ben reacts to Solo's stupid attempt to impress them with
obvious misinformation.​

It's pretty clear here that Lucas put that in as HAN saying something stupid...not Lucas.
The problem was that the audience wasn't versed enough to catch the "obvious misinformation" and subsequently decided that Lucas was the stupid one for writing it.
No. You (the audience) thought it meant time, took it as time, saw Ben's facial reactions and took it to mean that he was impressed, and not humored at Han's stupidity, and then later learned that a parsec was a unit of distance and not time, and then decided that Lucas meant that it was a unit of time and not distance, and...ohph...yeah...what a mess.

Now eventually this just got worked into things as Han not being stupid, and his "misinformation" instead being that he couldn't have possibly traveled at that parsec rating given the conditions of Kessel, so then it got made up into a distance cheat of yada, yada, yada, and how he actually did do this.

Now, I like both versions of this possibility.
On one hand, I like the idea of Han saying "parsec" as a unit of time and Ben thinking, "WTF! Idiot!", but I also love the idea of parsec being accurate and it being a measurement of distance as would be commonly done in space with things like hyperspeed where time would be horribly irrelevant as a measurement of how fast something was done, and instead, you would want to know the distance that was accomplished from point A to point B because if you can accomplish a shorter distance than others, then that is impressive and you found something everyone else couldn't find.

So, since things went this route over time; that parsec is how things are actually measured in Star Wars, and Han wasn't being an accidental idiot bragging about the wrong thing, the entire point of the Kessel run that we get isn't that 'Oh well, he just took a shortcut; albeit a dangerous one, but still...why brag about that?'

They make a point that him bragging about it didn't make any sense because it had nothing to do with his skill.

Firstly, I entirely disagree with that claim. Yes, everyone chipped in.
On the other hand, no one would have been able to chip in on anything if Han wasn't the one flying because the ship would have been torn to pieces WELL before they could have ever done anything.

Secondly, only Han is insane enough to inject coaxium straight into the core like that - everyone else is basically looking at Han like, "Um...WTF?!" when he tosses that idea out there. It's just that no one else has a better one, and Han's psychotic enough to try his insane log-odds ideas ("Never tell me the odds").

Thirdly, Han doesn't brag that HE made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs, he brags that:

HAN
It's the ship that made the Kessel
run in less than twelve parsecs!​

SHIP.
Not "I"; "Ship."

And this is held accurate in SOLO because the only way they get through Kessel is because the Falcon, the SHIP, now has possibly one of the best navigation computers on board in the entire galaxy thanks to L3's component systems being uploaded into it.

Other ships would try to find a navigation path through Kessel and never find a successful solultion.
The Falcon's navigation did.
Ergo, "It's the SHIP that made..."

Even when it's brought back up in A Force Awakens, even REY doesn't say that HAN made the run; she says "This is the SHIP..."

REY
This is the ship that made the Kessel
Run in fourteen parsecs...!​

If there's actually anything that EVERYONE has subsequently gotten wrong, it's this.

HAN
It's the ship that made the Kessel
run in less than twelve parsecs!​

A Force Awakens

REY
This is the ship that made the Kessel
Run in fourteen parsecs...!

HAN
Twelve!
(with disdain)
Fourteen
​

SOLO

HAN
It's twelve if you round down!​

This is actually the only real current "error" if you want to find one.
It wouldn't be an "error" so much if the old Han in TFA didn't go over the claim in ANH made by HAN.
Then we would just imagine that Han got 12.x parsecs, rounded down to 12 at first, then grew up and bragged about it more and more until it became "Less than 12" and then that's where it remained.

The easy out for this "error" is that Han (and lots of people in Star Wars, actually...I'm looking at you BEN!) are pretty loose with the truth and reality slips around its facts according to those characters quite a bit, so Han could have just gone back to "12" in his old age because it was easier than "12.x" and more accurate than "less than 12" back in his bragging mercenary days when he needed to brag (read, an advertising stretch of the truth) for more money.



But the real point here is that HAN doesn't brag about himself doing it; no one does in Star Wars.
He brags about the SHIP.
If Rey was up to the crazy methods needed to repeat the Kessel run, she and Chewie could still have a possibility of achieving the same results, but they would have to have everything work out just as well and it's likely never going to be worth anyone's time to do that run in that way again because it's the same net effect as nearly dying every time you try it with the odds heavily against your favor.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I was always very happy with the way GL intended it. Han being a blow hard to impress a client. It totally fit with his character of a swindler and scoundrel. Shooting first also fits this. Which, as we all know, made for a great arc as he flew in to save the day at the end of ANH.

There has been a retconing of Han, started by George messing around with the OT, trying to make him a hero before he meet Luke. There was good in him, but he looked after himself first.

 

I read a biography years ago of George Lucas. There was a story that I read that I think speaks volumes about George Lucas' perspectives on his creations.

I'm paraphrasing from memory, but it basically goes something like this:

When Lucas was a kid, he would construct haunted houses and charge admission.
He would keep track of the sales day after day.
When he saw that the sales were starting to drop by some value that he didn't like, he would shut down the haunted house, redesign in, and then reopen it the next day; advertising that it was all new.​

So; that's what Lucas was doing as a kid, so I can't say that it's incredible that he's also that way with the films that he makes.

So when Lucas saw that the gag with the parsec didn't work; I'm not at all shocked that he would then spin it to what people did think it was and just run with it...that's right up his ally of thinking.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

I think George just misjudged initially the amount of people who knew what a parsec was.

Nice story though.

 

Oh, absolutely.
That's what I was trying to convey; that Lucas is a shrewd businessman, that he always had been (according to anecdotes from those who knew him as a kid), and that he assumed people would get the joke, and when they didn't, as always the remodeler, he repackaged it as literal and rolled with it.

The same sort of thing happened leading up to the prequels.
Everyone thinks that Lucas only CGI adjusted the films just to tamper with them, but really he was primarily altering things to readjust the narrative to better fit his "poetry" (chiasmus) framework that he wanted to hammer home in the prequels because he thought people would get it in the original trilogy, but when he refrained things in ROTJ from ANH (at the time) it seemed to go right over people's heads and they seemed to take it as "copying" ANH instead of "echoing" in a poetic refrain like he intended, and - more importantly - it allowed him to repackage them as "new" and stir up Star Wars interest ahead of making the prequels, and more (regardless how often he repeatedly denied plans to make more...yeah, technically there's no delivered plans, but in his head there was always a want and some rough ideas...he had them all the way back during the OT and talked about them all the way back then).

Like the now infamous Greedo scene; Lucas flipped that to Han shooting second because "Han Solo was going to marry Leia, and you look back and say, 'Should he be a cold-blooded killer?'"
He spun that a few different ways, but the reason for the switch up was simple: he was thinking about making a movie where Han and Leia get married and he wanted to reframe Han's character to what he was working on painting him to be for the new Haunted house opening he was working on.

Lucas is a work of paradoxes, and contradictions, but the easiest way to see past all of them is that it's all for monetary reasons. He loves his creation, but it's not holy to him, "it's not a religious event. I hate to tell people that. It's a movie, just a movie", even if these "just a movie" films are also, "my kids".
How do you merge these two things? Simple. Their kids like the Apple Lisa was a kid to Steve Jobs. As in, "I created them. I'm very intimately involved in them."

But that doesn't mean they are non-adjustable in Lucas' way of thinking; clearly.
It means that he's protective over who gets to adjust his product and how they do that. Or, at least, he was. Then the fanbase yelled at him so much, and he got old enough and had a new kid and family, that he decided that he really didn't need it anymore and decided to call it quits because, "everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are."

That's a long way of saying, "Yep. He misjudged the audience, and then figured out a way to spin that to his advantage; which is pretty par for the course for Lucas."

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Sadly it seems to me that if one could pour these guys love of Star Wars along with that of all their adoring and snark loving fans into a thimble there would still room for a thumb with room to spare.

People are certainly entitled to their opinions but they are not entitled to their opinions being given weight or even going without rebuke.

Doubly so when there is the grating insistence on refusing from the word go to grant any respect at all to anyone else's. Probably to the point now that it is almost just reflex.
It's unfortunate yet strong evidence of lack of confidence in one's own viewpoint or textbook projection to be unable to refrain from accusing anyone that doesn't agree with them to be a "shill" or an idiot or a liar.

That or I guess there is a reasonable possibility of pea brained arrogance that demands their personal opinion be regarded as fact I reckon because it is true to them?

 

I didn't care for them during the PT area (Plinkett is lame and NOT funny), and I still don't care for them today. I wish they had the balls to do one about the OT, but then again, the OT is the perfect film in their eyes. More like a review from an OT purist which is a form of shill.

 

Mr. Plinkett (or whoever it is that writes the material, I have no idea if it is the same guy whose voice we hear) has a good understanding of movies and the moviemaking process. There are some legit insights and observations.

Having said that, yes he does tend to overreact to things and, IMHO, feed off of being overly critical.

 

The words that always came to my mind were, "cynical", and, "jaded".

Cheers,
Jayson

 

They're often a mix of legitimate critique and some tongue-in-cheek over-reactionary fanboyisms.

In truth, Plinkett can be pretty funny, and part of that is the way he walks the line between pointing out some of the more absurd creative decisions or flubs made along with his depiction of a cringey and bitter fan.

The problem is when people don't catch on to the satire of the thing and take every single word that comes from Plinkett video as gospel.

Either way, Half in the Bag just doesn't have these strengths. It's just cringey all around, with little self awareness, at least as far as I can tell.

 

Lame and their Ben Stein impersonation is stupid. These guys are nut jobs. The fans wanted a Boba Fett movie! Go way back to 2014 when they announced doing spin off movies. The two most mention movies were Obi-Wan and Boba Fett. I'm glad RLM isn't in charge of SW. Their making a movie that people were asking for and now that it's happening their mad. PT was original for it's time and look how that turned out?

 

*pukes in mouth just looking at that thumbnail