"Accomplishments"
In theatres: It's tense, it's funny, it's touching, it's charming, it looks gorgeous, Project Hail Mary is a full entertainment and I would only dock it half a star for being a little too goofy at times, given its hard(ish) SF origins, but that's not a big complaint. Ryan Gosling has become that guy - leading man looks and a strong dramatic resume, but he's incredibly good at comedy, and if Lord and Miller, comedy directors, aren't an obvious pick to make a science thriller adapted from a novel by the writer of The Martian, they're a great match to Gosling's comic ability. And he's not alone. The ground crew - especially Sandra Hüller - have an amazing deadpan as well. At the heart of this high-stakes scientific mission is an unusual friendship between our reluctant hero and an alien feels like a throwback to the fugly but adorable inhuman co-leads of 80s sci-fi, like E.T. and Short Circuit's Number 5. "Rocky" is more alien than they were, but thankfully, our species emotional contexts prove compatible. Go to the movies and fall in love, folks. There might even be a slim metaphor in the fact that what's destroying Earth's ecosystem is a power source. Or just admire Gosling's A-level t-shirt game (has anyone ever won a wardrobe Oscar for funny T's?).
At home: Sometimes, I feel like every new show I watch is stressing me out, and Seth Rogen's The Studio is very stressful indeed. Rogan plays a new studio head who's heart is in the right place (art), but is confronted with the realities of Hollywood (ego and money) at every turn. It's funny, and he tries to make each episode's style match the content ("The Oner" is, for example, a oner), but man, is it ever frantic. Everything's falling apart and Rogen's character can't help but get in his own way. The production values are really very high, not just directorially, but in its use of real actors and directors playing themselves (or parody versions of themselves), getting involved in film spoofs that satirize how things work behind the scenes. How Rogan got all these people to play his game is a wonderful mystery and really makes the show feel like a tell-all rather than pure fiction, even if Continental isn't a real studio. And despite the send-up, there's a real love of film permeating the production. RIP Catherine O'Hara, you and your character will be missed in the next season.
There's something extremely cartoonish about RATS! - in a Family Guy, rather than Loony Tunes sense - or perhaps we should see it as a vulgar and gory Naked Gun, but it IS enjoyable as a piece of absurdist comedy. A young vandal is put to snitch work in his criminal cousin's house by a psychotic lady cop, while also making friends with a girl on his community service detail. The result fairly haphazard plot-wise, very weird gag-wise (the "hands" thing alone...), and variable acting-wise (as one might expect from a local production). The three young leads - Luke Wilcox, Darius Autry and Khali McDuff Sykes - all deserve more work. Danielle Evon Ploeger really goes for broke as the crazed cop, so I can't tell if she can reasonably act. It's more like an extreme improv schtick. But for all its indie production flaws, I can't deny it has energy and a lot of (often vile and unhinged) imagination.
In China, you can hire a Mistress Dispeller to break up your spouse's affair, and this documentary follows a case from top to bottom, with no reenactments and full permission by all involved. How they did that is rather mystifying, though it involves a promise the film would never be shown in China itself, fixed cameras left running so they could catch real life without a crew present, and several other couples in trouble who never gave their permissions over some three years. That makes the intimacy captured more believable, as who would want their dirty laundry aired in a documentary, considering the shame that comes with being a perpetrator or victim of adultery. There's a glancing blow at China's match-making industry - an ironic context and no more, here - the main focus being the relationships, with raw (but restrained) emotions being brought out, or at least, the participants' willingness to self-reflect. The empathy proffered to the mistress, in particular, was very touching. As for the dispeller herself, she's incredibly good at her job, deftly analyzing psychologies and manipulating all concerned into fixing their lives and thinking it was their own idea. She's like an undercover therapist.
In the mid-2000s, an art collective found a secret space in a giant Providence, Rhode Island, mall, and moved in. Even documented themselves, to a point. In 2024 - one suspects it's when the statute of limitations lapsed - Secret Mall Apartment is able to tell their story. There wouldn't have been much to say had this been simple teenage shenanigans, but that it started as a kind of protest against a commercial center aimed at tourism rather than a poor and newly unhoused population gives it more heft. That it was considered, at least by some, as a kind of art project commenting on capitalism, does too. But it's still not entirely enough, so there are some connected detours. The history of Providence in relation to the mall makes sense, while exploring other projects by the art collective seem more like filler. These DO bolster the idea that it WAS art, and not illegal trespass, though we're absolutely in our rights to wonder of the people involved aren't now blowing smoke up our collective bum to wash themselves clean of youthful hijinks. It's still a winning doc, filled with positivity, about a strange little event.
It's quite amusing to me that though Hot Shots! is mostly a parody of Top Gun (and really gets the Tony Scott aesthetic, just as Charlie Sheen manages to have the right Tom Cruise energy), it's also a parody of Top Gun: Maverick... or did the latterly Top Gun sequel just steal its plot points from this film? The people who brought us Airplane, bring us another amusing performance by Lloyd Bridges (certainly one of the highlights), and as is usual for this kind of comedy, a lot of variable gags. It sometimes feels like half the jokes are just about treating jets as if they were cars, though the percentage is probably lower than that. And yet, it all still works reasonably well, and there were a lot of laughs around the living room, and far less "dated" humor than expected (some racist material targeting Native Americans and Iraqis). I cant' help but imagine that filming these gags must have been a hoot (the piano sequence, for example), and that's all sort of infectious.
While Charlie Kaufman is better known as the writer of such strange, artsy fare as Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, he HAS directed his own fever dreams (Synecdoche, New York; Anomalisa), but he didn't write How to Shoot a Ghost, though I think he makes it his own. Rather, this is a script by poet Eva H.D., who can be heard delivering it in voice-over (and regardless of the total effect, there are some wonderful crystalline lines throughout). Set in one of our most ancient cities, Athens, we follow two lost souls who may or may not be ghosts - Jessie Buckley (so yes, of course, yes) and Josef Akiki - both outsiders and therefore "ghosts" whether or not they are dead (the 27-minute film will make things clear, don't worry). In a large city, there are ghosts everywhere, or the notion of ghosts. People who seem anachronistic, or eccentric, or publicly sad... are they of this world, or from the next, but lingering here? Kaufman layers in ambiguity and the audience ends up inventing its own meanings.
Hlynur Pálmason's Joan of Arc falls into the category of films I respect more than enjoy (note that I have not seen The Love That Remains, made in parallel, at time of review). A fixed camera on a landscape in Iceland, cutting through days and seasons, kids (the film maker's own) build a chivalrous dummy, which over time becomes understood as an effigy of Joan of Arc, and ultimately, destroy it. Though it's barely more than an hour, it's mostly a couple of little boys playing at soldiers and using their dummy for target practice, they dialog naturalistic childish conversation, so it's not entirely engaging. But the Solaris effect takes hold soon enough. When I see films that are very still and uneventful, my mind starts to wander and metaphors come out of the woodwork, whether intended or not. In this case, the idea that the knight becomes a woman, which little boys attack and torture daily as "play" is more potent than their own lines about war (which feel like a misdirect) or the idea of Vikings are symbols of toxic masculinity. Like I said, I appreciate the effort of creating a fixed point film, but it's a stillness I appreciate more on an intellectual level than an emotional one.
[1939] The Rules of the Game: As well-received Jean Renoir's "La Règle du jeu" is, I do think it's of its time and of its place. A savage critique of the rich French bourgeoisie/nobility at the start of the Second World War, I found it difficult to care about its privileged a-holes having affairs and not caring if their spouses did too, even as the butt of a joke. The object of everyone's affection, Christine (Nora Gregor)is dull indeed, and I just don't get it. At its best, the film plays like Oscar Wilde, but too often, the wit is replaced by shouting and screaming, the sound quality of which puts my teeth on edge. Regardless of the point it's making, I could also do without the hunting massacre caught on film in the first half. I'm much more interested in the lower-class characters who are either more tragic or more comical, and if Renoir had focused even more on the "downstairs", only intersecting with the "upstairs", I would have enjoyed this satirical classic a lot more. At least the ending provokes the same kind of "eat the rich" reflex a lot of modern films on this subject do.
[1940] My Favorite Wife: If the screwball comedy doesn't quite lift, it's because it hinges on characters being unable to speak complete sentences at their loved ones, and it can't sustain the audience's disbelief at their continued communication weaknesses. Cary Grant plays a rather uptight man and isn't allowed to use much of his innate charm, who remarries after his wife (Irene Dunne) has been lost at sea and declared dead... on the very day she makes a surprise return. Now, if My Favorite Wife were to commit to one of its funny premises, I'd be more inclined to forgive it. There's something saucy about the bedroom farce developing at the onset, with everyone worried that the Hays Code will be broken, but it doesn't last. We might like it as a proper romantic dilemma, with Grant trapped in a love triangle, but his preference for Dunne means it's all quite academic and the character is just an abject coward who can't break off the later relationship, but never because he cares about Gail Patrick. And when you think it's all resolved, there's a bonus reel where, though she got what she wanted, Dunne tortures him for having taken so long. There are some very fun bits - the phone booth gag, the precocious kids, the final gag - which is why it's so frustrating that they couldn't make this one work better on a plot level. The obnoxious comedy music and slide whistles don't do it any favors either.
[1941] 49th Parallel: Before watching this British war-time adventure film, I joked that Canada would be played by a quarry in Wales, but no, it was shot here, indeed across several provinces, even the studio stuff. Well, there WAS a war on across the Pond. Leslie Howard and Laurence Olivier may be headlining the credits, but neither appears for all that long (indeed, Howard is a last half-hour surprise). Rather, our protagonists are a small squad of Nazis who, after their U-boat is sunk in Hudson Bay, try to make their way West and Out. And we quickly discover that this is a two-pronged propaganda film. First, the Canadian patriotism is cranked up to 11. Second, the whole point of the film is to demolish Nazi ideology, with every set piece having the Nazis spout some racist or fascist nonsense, and then being proved wrong (yet never learning their lesson). It's even spelled out in the stakes - if they make it out of the country, it'll be a P.R. win for Germany, and even if they're caught, Germany will still spin them into heroes of the Fatherland. It's unfortunate that the structure requires non-villainous characters to shuffle on and off stage as the journey progresses, because Olivier's French-Canadian is a lot of fun (and one of the better such accents I've heard, he did his research), and Howard's apparently effete "coward" is, too, and not what you'd expect. Films about World War II MADE during World War II are a very interesting gauge for how the public was understanding its stakes (for example, the American edit, at the time, shies away from a lot of the remonstrating of antisemitism and racism to play to certain audiences, while the enemy values are clear to citizens of the Commonwealth), and though 49th Parallel has all the subtlety of a hammer, I like seeing the Canadian perspective.
[1942] L'assassin habite au... 21 (The Murderer Lives at Number 21): I loved this! Clouzot adapts a mystery novel with the help of its author, and it comes off as a witty little whodunit, its comedy evoking Hitchcock's British output, but more willing to make sex jokes forbidden to Brits and, even more so, to Hollywood. The plot concerns a murderer who leaves a calling card, and efforts by a couple to solve the murder. Unlike, say, the Charleses from The Thin Man, they are in direct competition - the detective whose job is on the line, and the chanteuse who wants notoriety to jump start her career. Pierre Fresnay and Suzy Delair are basically France's answer to Powell and Loy, but have their own style and give the kind of performance that makes me want to look at their careers more closely. My essential complaint is that it wasn't long enough, and would have enjoyed a concluding button rather than the quick fade to End card we get. It's a complaint that sounds like a compliment because it is one.
Books: For a reader like me, who, as a kid, poured over Dungeons & Dragons' Monster Manual, Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings offers a certain sense of revertigo. Instead of the Manual's nerdy stats, my adult self gets literary references from both the shallow and deep ends of the pool, with quick descriptions of animals, monsters and deities from across the world, whether from folklore, myth or literature. Often, Borges's entries end and begin with quotation marks, but though translator Andrew Hurley found many of the original sources so he could do the work, even he admits that it's Borges - there's no way to know if the unknown sources are really obscure, or if the great Argentine writer playfully made it up. Between the sort of convivial scholarship on show and Peter Sis's mystical drawings of some of the creatures, the Book feels like a strange artifact one might have found in the Library of Babel, perhaps next to the vanished encyclopedia volume that told Borges's fictional self of Tlön.
The original French title for The Library Mule of Cordoba is - I'm sorry - much cooler. La Bibliomule de Cordoue? BIBLIOMULE? That's fire. Written by Wilfrid Lupano with Léonard Chemineau's Euro-style cartooning, the graphic novel is as charming as it is instructive, an exploration of how much knowledge and classical works were preserved through the scribes of the Ottoman Empire, in spite of repeated efforts by religious zealots to destroy anything that didn't conform to the works used for population control. It's told as a fun little adventure in which the court librarian attempts to escape Ottoman-ruled Spain with priceless books before they are burned by a fascist regency, with a copyist, a thief and a hard-headed mule in tow, with frequent digressions as if opening one of the volumes, and then sandbags you with its all-too-relevant ending. The bibliomule is fictional, but the authors' love for books is as real as the history they've set their tall tale in. And the beautiful art is never afraid of going silent in spite of its subject matter.
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