Luminosity Explained

I watched “Project Hail Mary” (see: yesterday’s review) at my preferred theater, the Davis, a three-screener nestled one neighborhood over from mine and unaffiliated with any of the chain monoliths. They are mostly a first-run place, but they host repertory screenings too, like 1995’s “Party Girl” this Thursday. As such, they showed a trailer of it prior to “Project Hail Mary” and though I watched Parker Posey’s indie classic several times on VHS back in the day and again at some point on DVD in the current century, I have never seen it on the big screen. When the preview transitioned from its opening image of Posey walking down a New York street to a close-up of Posey, oh my god, reader, it was like a solar flare; I practically put my hands in front of my face to shield myself from the intense silver screen radiation. 

The “Party Girl” trailer was not on 35mm, alas, and so absent that glorious crackle, but still, as a 4K restoration, it looked like 35mm film and served as a revelatory contrast against the ensuing “Project Hail Mary” and its digital cameras. That “Party Girl” trailer was so much more tactile and lifelike even if, simultaneously, it went to show how putting a close-up of a lifelike image on the big screen transformed lifelike into larger than life. It reminded me of 20 years ago when I saw “Casablanca” on the big screen for the first time at The Music Box and that first close-up of Ingrid Bergman lit to look like an angel (you know the one I’m talking about) epitomized the notion of movie stars as flickering gods. “Project Hail Mary” might have specifically been filmed for IMAX to render it as big as possible, but those images of Tau Ceti and the far reaches of the Milky Way felt less celestial than the Queen of the Indies in close-up.

Project Hail Mary

“Project Hail Mary” might be littered with pop hits, from Harry Styles to the Scorpions to The Beatles, but the artist I kept thinking of was one not literally accounted for on the soundtrack: Max Martin. The ballyhooed Swedish record producer is known for so-called melodic math, a rigorous musical formula designed to maximize a pop song’s potential as a hit. That’s not bad, necessarily. Math is a universal language, as “Project Hail Mary” reminds us, but also, movies is magic, to quote Gregory Hines in “History of the World, Part One,” and the best blockbusters so seamlessly integrate their math that, in the end, magic is all you see. Though there is plenty to like about “Project Hail Mary,” too often all I could see were co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s figurative equations scribbled on a blackboard.

The math in “Project Hail Mary” is evident right from the start when Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up aboard a spaceship with no idea how he got there or where he’s going – in other words, Jason Bourne - assassin + astronaut = Ryland Grace. This way, Drew Goddard’s screenplay creates dual narratives, one going backwards to show us the genesis of his mission and another going forward to show us how that mission plays out. Grace (who is always called by his surname rather than his first name, and so shall we) is a middle school science teacher whose burgeoning academic career came undone when he authored a controversial paper. It is that very paper, however, that prompts Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) to recruit him for an international task force seeking answers to a mysterious microorganism spreading across the surface of the sun and causing it to dim, threatening the existence of humanity. An effusive American and a deadpan German, Gosling and Hüller form a fabulous odd couple, and whether the science makes sense to you, flies right over your head, or some combination of the two, it gets by on Hollywood terms via their two-person act.

When Grace determines that other stars in the solar system are being dimmed by this same microorganism save for one, Tau Ceti, a mission is prepped to fly the 12 light years there, figure out its secret of resistance, and then send the results home to concoct a cure. It’s a suicide mission, albeit a heroic one, and yet, two of Grace’s crewmates never make it all, failing to wake up from their induced comas, leaving him 70 trillion miles from home and all on his own. Though the tone in the subsequent scenes might have a problematic trickle-down effect we will get to in a moment, they also have an action-packed spunk that despite the onboard computer’s disembodied voice (Priya Kansara) conveniently giving Grace someone to speak with, frequently suggest a silent movie, Ryan Gosling as Harold Lloyd in “The Astronaut,” say. Yet, the equation dictates two buddy acts, one on earth and one in space, and so, Grace makes first contact with a five-legged rock-like alien that he nicknames Rocky as man and E.T. team up to try and save their respective home planets.

Rocky, voiced by James Ortiz and brought to life via puppetry, suggests Wilson the volleyball in “Cast Away” but manifested as Russell, the holy terror wilderness explorer stowaway in “Up,” fused with “The Fifth Element’s” manic Ruby Rhod with a HAL 9000 voice. Admittedly, it’s something of a Your Mileage May Vary situation, like how a lot of people seem to like “The Trip” movies but the celebrity impressions wear me out, and from my perspective, Rocky was…a lot. And the brief sequence where we see Grace driven batty by Rocky, too, does not cheekily temper its DEFCON 3-level annoyance but highlights why it’s a significant problem in the first place. What’s worse, though this emergent friendship is meant as to cure Grace’s default mode of isolation from the world around him, Lord and Miller’s narrative and aesthetic busyness prevents that alienation from existing in anything other than theory. And that underlines the big miscalculation in “Project Hail Mary’s” equation, exhaustive giving way to exhausting, brought home in just how long it takes to bring the whole shebang home, laying on so many false endings that I palpably sensed myself starting to tune out. That I did not entirely is a testament to Hüller, the kind of impending apocalypse project manager I would be inspired to work for, proving that you can stare down the end of the world with a droll expression.

The Cable Guy

As Ted Turner gradually transformed small-fry Atlanta UHF station WJRJ into TBS (Turner Broadcasting System), the first superstation, in the 1970s, he filled airtime by acquiring the rights to broadcast games of the local Major League Baseball team, the Atlanta Braves. He effectively remade them as America’s Team by literally marketing them as America’s Team, like Anheuser-Busch brandwashing Budweiser as the King of Beers, and in an era where the options for watching baseball games was limited, the sometimes-leftist Turner foreshadowed Reagan by essentially decreeing that every American deserved to watch as many baseball games as he or she damn pleased. It helped pave the way for our present-day streaming world were virtually every game in every American sport can be accessed one way or another just as Turner’s founding of CNN started us toward a slew of yammering 24-hour news networks, for better and for much, much worse. He also did his part to alter not just our moviegoing habits but our movie watching habits too. 

Turner, who died on May 6th at 87, could not fill airtime through baseball alone and so he showed movies too, both on TBS and its eventual sister station TNT (Turner Broadcasting Network). In the beginning, many of these movies were culled from the pre-1986 MGM catalogue which Turner took control of through a byzantine deal. He launched TNT, in fact, with a showing of “Gone with the Wind,” which he cited as his favorite movie, though in the early days he also ran “The Slugger’s Wife” incessantly, a 1985 critical bomb, yes, but also a movie all about his Atlanta Braves (he purchased them, too, in 1976) and in which he, himself, had a cameo. He could not turn that movie into a new classic like he might have wanted, but he created New Classics, nevertheless, a phrase he utilized for an America’s Team-like promotional campaign as he struck myriad licensing deals with other distribution companies. Upon obtaining cable rights to “The Shawshank Redemption” in 1997, he essentially incepted it into everyone’s mind as a New Classic by showing it, as director Frank Darabont would jokingly and appreciatively note, “every five minutes.” When a student in my freshmen rhetoric classic that fall at the University of Iowa cited “The Shawshank Redemption” as his favorite movie, I wanted to ask him, “And are the Atlanta Braves your favorite baseball team?”

Turner might have used the phrase New Classic, but I always preferred the more letter-for-letter term of TNT Movies, and as the evidence showed, “The Shawshank Redemption” was a consummate TNT Movie. It was so heavily telegraphed and glacially paced that in its full two-hour and twenty-two-minute form, its impact was deadened, whereas in short bursts, you could better appreciate the solid construction of its engaging individual scenes. “A Few Good Men” was a much bigger box office hit than “The Shawshank Redemption,” but I have long thought it was best appreciated as a TNT Movie where it could live its truth less as a triumphant courtroom drama of truth and justice than a slick Hollywood entertainment in the positive sense, constructed for maximum enjoyment. It is comprised of nothing but good scenes that can be enjoyed in any order, like Madonna’s “Immaculate Collection,” a movie as greatest hits compilation. Another Tom Cruise joint, “Cocktail,” is the ultimate TNT Movie seen through the looking glass the other way – a movie that only works, in a manner of speaking, in 10 to 15 fifteen increments on TNT on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

This might seem like a bastardization of the movies, like Turner infamously colorizing old monochrome classics like “Casablanca” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” to make them more palatable, I guess, for philistines who prefer their solemn national reflecting pools to be Caesars Palace swimming pool blue, but really, it evokes movies at their beginning, a la old nickelodeon shorts, while also hinting at our present of bite-size scenes in the form of YouTube clips or TikTok videos. I mean, really, is turning on “A Christmas Story” during its annual 24-hour Christmas marathon on TNT just to hear “Not a finger!” any different than TikTok distilling the Biblical behemoth “Solomon and Sheba” down to 7 seconds of Gina Lollobrigida?

“Solomon and Sheba” is the kind of movie liable to turn up on yet another Turner enterprise – Turner Classic Movies. Christened in 1994, also via a “Gone with the Wind” kickoff, TCM differed from its namesake’s other TeeVee ventures in so much as it was more akin to a public good, like the Smithsonian, as Maureen Dowd put it for The New York Times. It certainly educated me. The standard cinema classics were available at rental stores where I was from, but TCM allowed me to dig so much deeper and learn so much more; I never would have been able to complete the Jean Harlow filmography without it. And when my beloved 1998 thriller “Ronin” was added to its roster in 2022, it felt momentous, like an Atlantan’s favorite Brave, say, being enshrined by the Baseball Hall of Fame. As billionaires are wont to do, Ted Turner helped reshape the future, yet as most billionaires are not wont to do at all, when it came to cinema, he not only recognized but took substantial action to preserve its past. 

What Film Reels Would I Wear to the Met Gala?

May 4th might have marked what has become the informal day of celebration for “Star Wars,” as if every day in pop culture isn’t already “Star Wars” day, but it also marked the Met Gala, the premiere cultural event whose whole purpose to begin with nobody really knows. Held the first Monday of every May, the Met Gala technically exists to raise funds for The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but mostly, it’s a place for high society to be seen in chic clothing. That’s why it’s worth mentioning that the other Kylie, Jenner, showed up without her famous beau Timothée Chalamet who chose to honor his ticket to see his beloved New York Knicks in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals at Madison Square Garden. Timmy has endured some bad press recently and while it has been generally earned, it’s worth pointing out that by skipping The Costume Institute Benefit, he marked himself as a true Knick fan. Respect. I digress. The Met Gala. Right.

Nicole Kidman, her eminence, doubling as Met Gala co-chair, attended in a red feathered sequined gown inspired by “Moulin Rouge” and under any other circumstances, would have been his blog’s best dressed. But. While singer, songwriter, actor Sabrina Carpenter sported three outfits during the night, she walked the carpet in a Dior dress literally made of film reels from Billy Wilder’s 1954’s romantic comedy “Sabrina.” Well, that got me to thinking. I would never be invited to the Met Gala, of course, and even if I was, I would show up wearing my finest Homefield Apparel t-shirt under a Marine Layer blazer with Old Navy jeans and Adidas sneaks. But let’s pretend for a moment. Let’s pretend that I attended the Met Gala in a suit tailored from film reels; what film reels would they be?

If I’m following Carpenter’s lead, my theoretical suit would have to be Nick-inspired, of course, and though I’m tempted to say it should be “The Thin Man” given Nick Charles, who am I kidding, I can’t pull off William Powell any better than Robert Downey Jr. pulled off that pirate look at the 1989 Academy Awards. I can’t pull off Val Kilmer, either, as much I might like to honor his Nick Rivers of “Top Secret!” with some ill-advised comedy bit in which my film reels inadvertently catch on fire on the red carpet. No, I am much more of a Jesse Eisenberg who, (not) coincidentally, has played two movie characters named Nick in “Roger Dodger” and “30 Minutes or Less.” Ah, but Michael Cera, (not) coincidentally also played two movie characters named Nick in “Youth in Revolt” and, more appropriately in this circumstance, “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.” 

“Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” however, brings me to John Badham’s forgotten running-clock middling thriller “Nick of Time.” It should surprise no one that when I began brainstorming this inane exercise, my first thought was, well, I would need to wear the film feels of a middling thriller. “Nick of Time” is certainly middling, of that there is no doubt, but let us not forget John Cusack as one Nicholas Easter, hero of the greatest middling thriller of all time.

Incredulous Fashion Reporter: “And who are you wearing?”

Me: “‘Runaway Jury.’” 

The Moment

“The Moment” of Aidan Zamiri’s mockumentary satire refers to the long tail of success from British pop artist Charli XCX’s sixth studio album “Brat” and the cultural phenomenon that it spawned, one colloquially known as Brat Summer. That phenomenon, however, and the album itself, are never really explored or even explained in detail. No, true to its title, “The Moment” picks up at the point where the artist’s original intent, whatever it was, has been co-opted by the culture at large and turned into something out of the artist’s control. And so, the questions “The Moment” asks are: when, exactly, does a pop culture craze end, and how does it end, and why does it end, and who ends it? These questions have been asked before but even so, Charli XCX, who conceived the story that Zamiri and Bertie Brandes turned into a script, finagles creatively meta ways to ask them. Indeed, the question of when Brat Summer will conclude is literally posed aloud by none other than Stephen Colbert in an ersatz Charli XCX interview on The Late Show. I LOL’d. 

If Charli (we will refer to the character as Charli and the actor as XCX) seems ready to let the moment end, the surrounding industry types seek ways to prolong it, creating a Brat credit card and urging her to do what music stars have done time immemorial and make a concert film. In essence, that’s what “The Moment” is, the making of the making of the concert film as clueless handlers hire a director (Alexander Skarsgård) who cultivates an air of collaboration and openness while simultaneously practicing neither, seeking to transform Brat into a version of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. No doubt this stems in part from the real-world tension between XCX and TayTay, but it is, nevertheless, hilarious to see Charli throwing herself on the mercy of the industry machine by dangling from a stationary harness.

The format might draw from “This Is Spinal Tap” (1984), but the titular band in the mockumentary godfather was all about delusions of grandeur while Charli is wracked with exhaustion and self-loathing and seeks to sabotage her own concert movie. That suggests “This Is Spinal Tap” less than the mockumentary styled “Curb Your Enthusiasm” HBO pilot as do Charli’s comically cringe encounters with various people that drop in and out of her orbit. XCX effuses nimble comic timing and a genuine skill at deadpan in these moments, like the one on her tour bus where she hesitantly peers around a corner to reluctantly allow the driver to drop some ostensible knowledge, evincing celebrity as forever walking on eggshells rather than living among the clouds. If I were writing a Letterboxd review of “The Moment” I might just write that Charli XCX gives the performance of the year as Larry David. She’s a misanthrope for the TikTok generation.

I know, I know. Letterboxd, TikTok, Brat, Charli XCX, what is any of this in the first place? And that’s the thing about “The Moment”: it fails to offer any entry point for anyone who is not completely plugged into current pop culture unless you are the rare middle-aged dude such as myself who happens to totally be into Charli XCX. (I was the oldest person in the theater at my showing.) Likewise, a non-Charli’s Angel might watch “The Moment” and come away thinking, “Well, who is Charli XCX?” Adhering to narrative rules that we get to know the character before the character loses all sense of herself would yield a more powerful closing punch, no? Except the point of XCX’s shape-shifting persona has always been obfuscation of the person, and even more than that, an awesome defiance of the fan service that has come to define so much of modern pop culture. That’s one of the reasons I admire her artistry so much. And if the extreme close-ups of Charli throughout “The Moment” evoke a desperate desire for the camera to peel away the persona, she pushes back at every turn, brought home in a dizzying denouement where she might as well put “Brat” in a burn barrel out back, pour some gasoline on it, and light a match. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Missile (1988)

A sign affixed to the side of a building that we glimpse right near the start of Frederick Wiseman’s 1987 documentary welcomes us to Space & Missile Country. It put me in mind of the sorts of sign you might see in a tourist area, like one in St. Augustine, Florida, say, proclaiming Welcome to Fountain of Youth Country, or something. But this is not St. Augustine: this is Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, responsible not merely for safeguarding our nuclear missile supply but being prepared to launch those missiles in the event of American enemies launching at us. It is serious, not frivolous, and yet the tone of “Missile” is sober in a kind of prosaic way. Wiseman embeds us with the 4315th Training Squadron of the Strategic Air Command and so many scenes of these new recruits sitting and listening to instructors, the commonplaceness of it all, the little Styrofoam cups of coffee, the way there are couple eager beavers who answer and ask questions while most of them just sit there quietly, will take you right back to every first-week orientation of any job you have ever had, like going to work at America’s nuclear missile silo is akin to starting a job at General Mills. It’s humorous, relatable, and a little unsettling. 

“Missile” evokes such contradictory tones throughout its two-hour run time. Trainees are taught the launch angles of ICBMS while also being lectured on the necessity of keeping their workstation clean and not fraternizing with others. They go over the painstaking two-key turn system required to launch missiles and during one of the practice runs, a trainee struggles to insert her key. At one point we even see a trainee being given multiple choice test taking tips, as if examinations on ICBMs are the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. As was Wiseman’s preferred style, scenes like this are not embellished with talking heads, voiceovers, or even music; he lets them lie there for us to make of them what we will. That is not to say, however, that Wiseman (also credited as editor) is not deliberate in how he pieces together his many scenes. Near the beginning we eavesdrop on a classroom discussion about the moral implications of being ordered to launch missiles in which a senior officer stresses to the students not to merely function as unthinking robots. 

If this scene seems selected to impress a certain mental and moral weight on this crash course in nukes, it instead foreshadows a gradual sort of circular logic. Even if you are urged to contemplate what it means to be the last link in the intercontinental ballistic missile chain, you are just the last link in a chain, nevertheless, a riddle that can never truly be solved. Indeed, near the end we see a successful training exercise and when the ersatz ICBMs are launched, a small celebration ensues, like the new recruits have just earned the league title in bowling. True, Wiseman concludes with a speech citing deterrence as the main role of all these missile-minders, but at the end of the day, deterrence is just a solemn word for being prepared to bring about The Day After. 

Some Drivel On...Good Kill

The title of writer/director Andrew Niccol’s “Good Kill” (2013) refers to the prosaic confirmation issued by Air Force Major Tommy Egan (Ethan Hawke) each time he successfully terminates a confirmed target from above. He is not in a jetfighter when he does this, though, but piloting a drone from a desk chair in an air-conditioned cubicle outside Las Vegas thousands of miles away from America’s war on terror. Tommy pines for action in a real plane, asking his commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jack Johns (Bruce Greenwood), for reassignment despite being able to go home each night to his wife Molly (January Jones) and two kids. Whether dropping a bomb from an actual plane is more ethically justifiable than doing so via drone is glossed over, just as the absence of adrenaline in a desk chair as opposed to an ejector seat is never really addressed at all, illustrating “Good Kill’s” troubling blind spots. No, the core of “Good Kill” is drone warfare corroding Egan’s humanity and Hawke is up to the task. Normally such a lively, conversational actor, he reduces himself down to virtually nothing, echoing his own pale white skin to create something like a vampire who can be out in the bright Nevada sun.

As Egan and Johns integrate a new junior officer, Vera Suarez (Zoë Kravitz), into their team, so, too must they deal with increasingly morally ambiguous orders that are now being dispensed directly from the CIA (embodied in the voice of Peter Coyote), provoking Egan to emotionally shut down even more around his wife and drink heavily. These are familiar dramatic devices and, unfortunately, Niccol teases nothing new from them, the otherwise deliberately mechanical feel of his aesthetic trickling down in the worst way to his narrative. What’s more, his dialogue, especially between Egan and his colleagues, is never baked into that drama, tending more toward blatant point-counterpoint, as if we are watching a public affairs talk show discussing drone warfare. Greenwood, at least, in delivering a few monologues existing as much for our benefit as they do for those under the command of his character animates them with a kind of just-following-orders contempt that feels, at least, like something real rather than didactic points via the filmmaker.

It’s clear from several lines of dialogue that Niccol wants to demonstrate the muddle between drone warfare and video games, but then, that’s the problem, his script literally saying it only underlines how his filmmaking fails to evoke it. Tommy’s console, desk chair, and joystick look similar to a video game set-up, yes, but beyond that, “Good Kill” never approximates so-called game feel, it never blurs the lines between life in the room and the one on the screen. As if afraid of going too far or his message being misconstrued, Niccol refuses to reduce the onscreen killing to the point where we don’t feel anything at all.