Project Hail Ryan and Mary Full of Grace

The old European dream of exploration is often tied to individuals who have failed to find professional or personal success in their home countries. In new, strange lands, perhaps they meet a person or people who are awed by them. This has given birth, over the centuries, to many of the standard narratives of adventure fiction, and we find it again in 2026's Project Hail Mary. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller direct the film from a screenplay by Drew Goddard, based on a book by Andy Weir. Weir also wrote The Martian, which was also adapted to film with a screenplay by Drew Goddard. But while The Martian's director, Ridley Scott, was interested in the "man versus nature" conflict, Lord and Miller take a grain of that to deliver a more traditional Hollywood adventure story about masculine self-fulfillment. It's a less ambitious film but it's enjoyable.

Ryan Gosling plays a character with a name oddly similar to his own, Ryland Grace, a junior high school science teacher who was once a molecular biologist. The story's set in a future in which a strange, alien, microscopic lifeform is devouring stars, including Earth's sun. Grace is drafted into a desperate programme to study the thing and is then pressed into an interstellar voyage to find a way to eradicate the threat. He wakes up after being kept in stasis to find the other two crewmembers have died and that he's alone. Fortunately, he encounters a cute, diminutive alien life form he dubs "Rocky" who's on a mission similar to Grace's. Rocky essentially becomes Grace's devoted servant as the two attempt to save the universe.

I found myself thinking primarily of Robinson Crusoe and Breaking Bad. Rocky is basically Friday, the quintessential manservant, only cuter, while Grace's story, like Walter White's, is of a man who distinguished himself in a scientific field only to be exiled to the public school system. But while Walter White's motivation becomes revenge on the whole world, Ryland Grace exhibits more, well, grace.

One of the strangest things to come out of the film's promotion is that the book's author, Andy Weir, did an interview with The Critical Drinker, who, among right wing YouTube wanks, is probably the biggest knucklehead. I haven't watched the interview myself, nor have I watched or read the numerous reactions to it but I find it intriguing that this happened for a film that seeks to recontextualise the kind of story that, in the past, was used to assuage a young man's sense of resentment and inferiority.

Nevertheless, I found myself thinking a little bit of Lars and the Real Girl, a movie in which Gosling plays an infantilised man who is cared for by a community of sagacious women. Gosling has said that he based his performance in Project Hail Mary on Charlie Chaplin and there is a lot of slapstick as he bumbles around the ship. The only prominent female character in the film is the director of the project who sends Grace off on his destiny, Eva, played by Sandra Huller, the lead from Tony Erdmann, another movie that subverts a male power fantasy, in that case the power of male comedy.

I guess what I'm saying is that Project Hail Mary kind of seems like a conceptual retreat and advance in the ongoing project of trying to deal with the male ego. Grace is still infantilised, he's no Captain Kirk, but this is a story that caters to a man's need for validation through achievement, or recognition of achievement. It seems to have worked, given its positive reviews and box office.

As usual, the film borrows a lot of its sound and visuals from 2001: A Space Odyssey but the starfields are notably bright, reminiscent of Star Wars, for the film's aim of appealing to a larger demographic. It's ironic that Lord and Miller were famously fired from a Star Wars movie. Meanwhile, Ryan Gosling is going to star in the next one, assuming the failure of The Mandalorian and Grogu doesn't cause it to be shelved for a tax refund.

There're a Million Spiders in the City

I finished watching Spider-Noir last night, which wasn't bad, but not at all a show I was inclined to binge. Not even when I finished the penultimate episode did I feel like muscling the rest of the way through, though maybe that's because I knew the last episode would be badly written.

I'm noticing a pattern on Amazon Prime shows. On Fallout, Rings of Power, and Spider-Noir, there was a showrunner who had a proven track record of mediocrity and then some writers in the middle episodes who'd actually written something truly successful. I suppose it must be the competing desires in the studio to have someone they could easily manipulate and yet also to have someone who could deliver a quality product.

In this case, the showrunner was Oren Uziel whose credits include being one of five or six screenwriters in a few somewhat successful movies and being sole writer on the infamously dull Cloverfield Paradox. It turns out that he's good friends with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the pair behind the Spider-Verse movies, which Spider-Noir is kind of a spin-off of (Lord and Miller also directed the recent sci-fi movie Project Hail Mary).

As I kind of expected, the first couple episodes of Spider-Noir feel like they were written by someone whose idea of noir primarily comes from Sin City and Who Framed Roger Rabbit and maybe Chinatown.

Nicolas Cage is excellent as Ben Reilly, a hard boiled private detective who also happens to be a superhero known as "The Spider", an alternate universe version of Spider-Man. At one point in the series, he talks about trying to become human again after the encounter that gave him superpowers. He does so by watching movies and imitating actors. Cage has some funny moments where he does impressions of famous noir actors, even doing a version of the book shop scene from The Big Sleep when Bogart wore glasses and did a funny voice. At other times, Cage's Ben Reilly speaks with a slow, stiff diction like he's forcing out the communication. It works terrifically well.

Brendan Gleeson is excellent as the gangster Silvermane despite some inconsistent writing on his character from episode to episode. The rest of the cast is good enough though Li Jun Li is disappointing as Cat Hardy. She's based on Black Cat, Felicia Hardy, from the comics, which is odd because in terms of personality, background, costume, and physical appearance, she bears absolutely no resemblance to her comic counterpart. They decided not to make Spider-Man Peter Parker so it's puzzling that they chose this route for Cat. She's described as a "femme fatale" but she's written as more of a tsundere in the first couple episodes.

However, the series really starts to hit its stride halfway through when Steve Lightfoot starts contributing. Apparently, part of the way through production, Amazon brought Lightfoot on as "co-showrunner". Lightfoot is best known as showrunner on the first two seasons of Punisher.

This development somewhat resembles the development of Daredevil: Born Again. Disney originally hired a purportedly weak showrunner for that one and then brought in Dario Scardapane, who'd been a writer on Punisher, to take over. I'm starting to wonder if the situation had been the reverse of the one on Spider-Noir, though. Maybe the original writers on Born Again had too much creative vision and Disney/Marvel brought in Scardapane because they knew he'd do whatever stupid thing they told him to do.

Spider-Noir is available on Amazon Prime in both colour and black and white versions. I mostly watched it in colour but watched one episode in black and white. I gather it was originally intended to be only in black and white though it was originally shot in colour. After the decision was made, partway through production, to make a colour version, there were extensive reshoots. This indecision means that both versions frequently look odd. The colour version has too many harsh keylights in some shots and the black and white version sometimes looks too diffuse. But the studios will tell you that sometimes their meddling is really helpful.

Doctor . . . Who?

At least people seem to be interested in Doctor Who enough for rumours to be spreading about the Christmas special, that it might be scrapped. The impression I have is of circling sharks smelling blood. Russell T Davies has announced that there will be an announcement.

This morning I was watching The Hand of Fear, the Fourth Doctor serial. It's amazing how effective it still is, being shot on video tape with ultra low budget special effects. Maybe the trouble with Davies' second era is just that he had too much freedom. I don't think so. A low budget probably does provide incentive for better scripts and performances but there are other ways to provide incentives. The threat of cancellation may be a good one.

The chemistry between Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen was certainly key. The chemistry between the actor who plays the Doctor and the actress who plays the companion was really the heart of the show, particularly in Tom Baker's era. The low budget also compels you to notice the natural quality of it. I don't know how much of it was actually improvised but the chemistry comes off as authentic enough that one suspects lines often were. Well, Baker did marry Lalla Ward. It wouldn't shock me to learn he and Louise Jameson had a tryst, either. I don't feel like Elisabeth Sladen hooked up with him but they are a lot of fun together. I don't think she was going with Jon Pertwee either.

On the other hand, Hand of Fear has a real threesome vibe.

The Latest of the Old

I recently got the eleventh and newest edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. It was released last year and has a number of new editors and significant changes. I've been reading through Volume A, The Middle Ages--thankfully, this latest edition continues to be split up into volumes instead of being all lumped into huge cinder blocks. Volume A is the first of six volumes. Volume B covers the sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, C is the Restoration and the eighteenth century (sometimes referred to as "the long eighteenth century" in English history and literature), D is the Romantic Period, E is the Victorian, and F is the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Unsurprisingly, the newer you get, the less culturally relevant the material is. Don't expect CS Lewis, Roald Dahl, JK Rowling, or Alan Moore but you will find Patience Agbabi and Simon Armitage. You know, the absence of comics in the canon of English literature seems increasingly absurd.

Anyway, as I said, I've been reading the Middle Ages. Beowulf is, as always, included in its entirety and it's the Seamus Heaney translation (from Old English) once again. Among the new inclusions are writings from King Alfred and an eleventh century sermon from the Bishop Wulfstan of York which begins:

Beloved men, know the truth: this world is in haste and it approaches the end.

And so the longer things go in this world, the worse they get. It must necessarily be the case, therefore, on account of the people's sinfulness, that our predicament will badly deteriorate before the arrival of the Antichrist. It will indeed be awful and grim widely throughout the world.

Things haven't changed so much. He may as well be talking about global warming. Certainly the Danish invasion terrifying the people at the time was just as real.

The section of Romances has been expanded and yesterday I read The Lady of the Fountain, an Arthurian romance of unknown authorship, though it tells the same story as a French version by Cretien de Troyes (it's not known who wrote the story first or if both were inspired by a third party). In it, Owain, a knight of Arthur's court, goes on a quest to vanquish a fearsome foe, encountering numerous beautiful women on the way. When he's trapped behind the portcullis of the enemy's castle, a maiden named Luned takes a fancy to him and decides to help him, only for him later to ask her to help him woo the widow of the villainous Earl. Generally the story is about how Owain's flaw is that he recklessly courted too many maidens. There's plenty of action, too, including a pretty good fight between Owain and a number of Arthur's other knights. And there's a black lion.

Not Worth Dying For, Even When Death is Cheap

Joe Pantoliano attains a talent for resurrection thanks to a cat's internal organ in "Dig That Cat . . . He's Real Gone", the third episode of Tales from the Crypt from June 10, 1989. Richard Donner directed this zany, dreamlike episode based on a Haunt of Fear comic.

The story just assumes that cats actually have nine lives and there's a rational, anatomical explanation for it. I love how it just runs with that logic. Then it assumes people at a carnival will want to stand around for an hour waiting for Joey Pants to come back to life, and not even in situations that couldn't be easily faked by a halfway talented magician, like hanging or being buried alive without even a camera in the coffin.

Robert Wuhl plays the barker working with Pantoliano. A lot of the episode is him roaming around the tent with a series of fake moustaches, his face crammed in fish bowl, wide angle shots. I haven't read the particular comic but it really captures that feeling I had when reading Tales from the Crypt of exhausted writers turning to whatever random train of thought they could come up with for a grim. vaguely ironic tale. There is something insightful in the story's idea of how human preoccupation works. I can almost believe a crowd would be interested in the show and that the main characters would believe this would work as a viable attraction. There's an emotional logic at play.

Tales from the Crypt is available on Shudder.

Sonnet 1994

The dance routine equation smashed a ham.
With stomping feet, the dancers killed a pig.
A pound of pork was worth a slice of lamb.
Inversely tasty prices fell from big.
A queue of laughing clowns collect the cash.
But money changed to lightning moths at dawn.
The bugs were made of light and something rash.
The fission needed came from hostile brawn.
The priests collected torches round the block.
But bulbs are dear among benighted souls.
So some would use a giant woolen sock.
A talking sword would fill the thing with holes.
The cruise concludes across a silver sea.
The wasps exclude the only busy bee.

Regarding Young Henry

Usually when I watch The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles I tend to skip around to this or that episode that draws my interest for various reasons. Although there is a serial quality to the series with episodes frequently ending in ways that lead into the next, particularly in the case of the reedited version of the series that appeared in the late '90s, the stories all still feel very disconnected from one another, typically featuring Indy meeting a whole new cast of characters and forming new friendships that are rarely referenced in later episodes. But I decided to go back to the first episode, in its reedited form appropriately called My First Adventure. The reedited version of the series typically cuts together two previously one hour episodes to create a TV movie. In this case, My First Adventure takes part of the original 1992 premiere episode, "Curse of the Jackal", and fills out the run time with a story filmed in 1996. Unfortunately, this means that actor Corey Carrier, who plays Indy at ages 8 to 10, looks and sounds markedly older in the second half of the episode than he does in the first. I do think he seems more Harrison Ford-ish than Sean Patrick Flanery but who really wants to see Indiana Jones as a kid? That is maybe the eternal flaw of the show but I was watching the first half of My First Adventure trying to pinpoint the real reason it doesn't work.

Little Indy goes to Egypt with his parents and meets pre-war TE Lawrence (Joseph A. Bennett) taking part in the exploration of a pyramid in 1908. The fact that Indy met just about every famous person in the world in his youth also cuts into the show's sense of credibility though I guess I appreciate the fact that George Lucas wanted to make the show educational. Indy encounters Lawrence again during the war (played by Douglas Henshall) for a better episode featuring a young Catherine Zeta-Jones. Mostly I'd say My First Adventure doesn't work because Indy himself comes off so flat. He's an enthusiastic kid but little else.

The second half of the episode is a little more interesting. The abruptly older young Indy moves on to Morocco where his father (Lloyd Owen doing a Sean Connery impression) has been engaged to deliver a lecture to the Sultan. Indy befriends a palace slave and I liked how the script framed Indy as a relatively sheltered white kid having direct exposure to slavery for the first time. The slave, Omar, has of course been kept ignorant of the world and listens amazed as Indy describes snow and sea travel. But Indy shows his own ignorance when he continually presumes Omar is at liberty to think for himself or express his own desires when asked a question.

One thing's for sure, the massive budget on the show is always visible in the extensive location shoots and enormous local cast.

Won't Someone Think of the Dolls?

In the "More Things Change, the More they Stay the Same" department, I found it funny that the articles I've read about Olivia Rodrigo's babydoll dress tend not to mention the 1956 film Baby Doll that popularised the garment. At that time, according to Wikipedia:

Baby Doll courted controversy before its release with the display of a promotional billboard in New York City that depicted [the film's star, Carroll] Baker lying in a crib and sucking her thumb. Cardinal Spellman urged both Catholics and non-Catholics to avoid the film, deeming it a moral danger.

The film is about a middle aged man married to a nineteen year old girl. Now, Olivia Rodrigo has been criticised for wearing that same notorious garment. She doesn't defend herself very cogently but she shouldn't have to. That's the job of a critic, not an artist.

The article linked to at Bustle decries the possibility of "sexualising" Rodrigo. The astounding bad faith in this premise makes the enormous leap of ignoring trends of sexually provocative costumes and performances in popular music for the past 70 years. Of course part of the point of such costumes is to look sexy. Sex is part of human nature and so, therefore, is sexual attraction and it absolutely has a place in popular art because it reflects who we are.

But does the babydoll dress somehow encourage paedophilia? Rodrigo is 23 years old but as in the 1956 movie the idea is of course to tease a woman in a juvenile aesthetic. Why is this sexy? Is it normalising paedophilia? Desmond Morris one opined that women had juvenile physical features in contrast to men--larger eyes, slimmer shoulders, higher voice pitch, and less body hair--in order to provoke a protective impulse in men. So the single instinct the human being has to be protective of children triggered by physical features does double duty. One could ask, I suppose, which came first. Do women look like children or do children look like women?

"What is it about schoolgirls?" asked Elias Koteas in Exotica, a movie I talked about last week. In that movie, in which a main character is a stripper whose shtick is to wear schoolgirl uniforms, the answer is that theoretically schoolgirls are pure, they lack the "baggage" of adults. In Oingo Boingo's "Little Girls", a song which, despite how it's typically regarded, really mocks paedophiles, singer Danny Elfman sings from the point of view of a paedophile:

They don't care if I'm a one-way mirror
Well, they're not frightened by my cold exterior
They don't ask me questions
They don't want to scold me
They don't look for answers
They just want to hold me

Of course, anyone who's seen Mean Girls or spent quality time with teenage girls will know that it's absurd to say that young girls aren't judgemental. Part of maturing to adulthood is learning to be less judgemental of people who are unlike oneself, not more judgemental. This idea of innocence in children has little to do with actual children. Real innocence is often cruel. It's only by shielding children from situations in which they would have to make complicated moral choices that we create the illusion of their infallible benevolence. To a child, our adult world is in many ways horrific.

Arguably, the juvenile aesthetic is meant to evoke childish as often as it does childlike qualities. That the idea of an adult acting with the amorality of a child is worthy of punishment. This is a fundamental idea behind S&M and the enticement of the term "naughty" in an adult context. But this is by definition not an encouragement to paedophilia since it requires an adult transgressing by adopting juvenile qualities. To say that the tease of a woman wearing a babydoll encourages paedophilia is sort of like saying the Hamburglar encourages theft. But I suppose I can see how the Hamburglar might be too sophisticated for certain segments of society.

They WERE Amazing . . .

In 1985, one of Steven Spielberg's many projects was the launch of a new anthology television series called Amazing Stories. I hadn't seen it since I was a kid so I watched the first episode again last night. Spielberg himself directed the first episode called "Ghost Train" about a family moving into a big house in the middle of nowhere and the grandfather's regrets about a derailed train he remembers in the area from his childhood. It turns out to be a big allegory about death and letting go of a loved one. It hasn't aged well.

It might have benefited from the "event" aspect of television in 1985 when, if you didn't catch something when it aired, it could be years before you got the chance to see it again. So for many, the legend became bigger than the show itself. Watching it now it feels a bit more like seeing someone imitating Spielberg than Spielberg himself. There's the sweeping crane shots, the ecstatic closeups, the well timed editing beats. The cast feels very much like a TV cast, though, especially the parents. The mother's reaction to seeing the ghost train reminded me of a commercial in which a woman's dealing with a plumbing problem.

The opening theme segment is pretty quaint. I actually remember thinking this cgi looked genuinely cool.

I still find something intriguingly ominous about the weird cave people and the family at the end, presumably meant to be normal folks. I get this vague impression of them being trapped in the stories somehow, like there's this unintended message of how the storytelling began in ancient times and trapped both the teller and the audience and now YOU'RE TRAPPED TOO.

What are Songs For?

I had to get a root canal yesterday and the dentist and his assistant were talking about the recent American Music Awards throughout the procedure. Apparently a number of South Korean artists, including BTS and Katseye, won big, making me wonder why it's called the "American Music Awards". But what are words for? Missing Persons asked this question with their hit song, "Words", back in 1982. That song charted at 42.

I thought BTS were over but apparently this year they already have the song of the summer.

I don't find it half as interesting as former song of the summer "Espresso" but that was all the way back in 2024. Times have changed.

The dentist and his assistant also talked about Justin Bieber. I had no idea people in the U.S. were still listening to Justin Bieber. Again, the algorithms have let me down. I wondered when was the last time I'd looked at the Billboard Hot 100. Actually, I'd looked at the charts recently because, going through my deceased father's things, I'd found a few decades ago he'd paid a research firm to provide him with a printout of the Hot 100 lists going back to the '60s. Nowadays, that information's readily available for free on Wikipedia.

So I looked at the current Hot 100 and saw that someone named Ella Langley had the top two spots with songs called "Choosin' Texas" and "Be Her" (to-day I see she's been unseated by Drake). I checked out both of those songs on YouTube and found them to be surprisingly boring. Also surprising is that "Choosin' Texas" only has 34 million views.

"Be Her", the number 2, has 15 million views accrued over three months while Olivia Rodrigo's "Drop Dead", which was at number 7, has 31 million views accrued over one month. How does that make sense?

According to Google's AI:

The Billboard Hot 100 ranks the most popular songs in the U.S. every week by combining three main metrics: streaming activity, radio airplay, and sales data (compiled by Billboard's data tracking partner, Luminate). The exact formula is a closely guarded trade secret, but the final rankings are generally determined by these core components

Those aren't very good metrics. How many people listen to the radio anymore? Both radio and sales data come with higher price tags--radio play nowadays comes with artificial financial incentives while sales data reflects the small percentage of people who still buy music. But as my father evidently discovered, the top ranking Billboard songs are often dull. How often do people still listen to 1973's number 1, "Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Ole Oak Tree" or "That's What Friends Are For" from 1986? How about 1996's number one, "Macarena"?

Anyway, although I found the Ella Langley songs to be dull, I noticed both of the songs contained the recurrent preoccupation with uncertainty and the difficulty in defining relationships I talked about in a post last month about Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo, and Sabrina Carpenter. "Choosin' Texas" finds the singer uncertain about the status of her relationship with her Texas boyfriend while "Be Her" is about wanting to become another person. This may be a generation experiencing exceptional difficulty defining itself. But what are words for?

Here Comes the Idea

Looking for feminism in Frankenstein is kind of like looking for romance in Alice in Wonderland. People really want it to be there and, if they look hard enough, they can find some compelling clues to suggest that it is there, and sometimes they go off and make analyses or adaptations that tease out these hints that turn out, in retrospect, to be largely projections originating from the analyst than anything the original author was probably ever interested in. Maggie Gyllenhaal's 2026 film The Bride! is at least among the more self-aware of those riffs and, in particular, fans of James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein may at least sympathise with Gyllenhaal's passion for that 1935 film. The Bride! is a very postmodern, academic film loaded with a modern political perspective, honestly more akin to Angela Carter than Mary Shelley. The performances and production design make it a delightful ride and I at least enjoyed it a little more than the similarly self-aware Frankenstein pastiche, Poor Things. Jessie Buckley is in the duel role of Mary Shelley and the reanimated Bride and she plays both like a narcissistic, theatrical actress, like Patti LuPone or Norma Desmond, someone at all times palpably enraptured by her own grandeur. Her playing both roles is one of the more obvious nods to Bride of Frankenstein, James Whale's cinematic sequel to his famous adaptation of Frankenstein, both films starring Boris Karloff as the monster. Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley and the Bride in Bride of Frankenstein and she is mesmerising. I certainly don't blame Maggie Gyllenhaal for wanting to build a whole movie around that performance. It made me a lifelong Elsa Lanchester fan and for years I sought out every movie with Lanchester I could get my hands on. It's a different kind of performance than Jessie Buckley delivers, though. While Buckley presents us with a woman captivated by the tragedy of her own unrecognised genius, Lanchester's performance as Mary Shelley is of a self-possessed, subtly perverse woman, amused at an unspoken joke while her performance as the Bride is like that of a terrified animal. Buckley's performance is fun but in a way less connected to her environment and story. Some reviewers compare her to Deadpool and I think that's valid.

It's not only Bride of Frankenstein that Gyllenhaal references. There are scads of references to cinema of the '20s and '30s stitched throughout the movie that I suspect will drastically lower any appreciation the uninitiated will feel for the movie but I could appreciate Buckley's impression of Marlene Dietrich or Jake Gyllenhaal's performance as a Fred Astaire-ish musical star.

The monster is played by Christian Bale with a sense of unwavering sincerity and devotion to his goal. At first he seemed like Maggie Gyllenhaal meant for him to come off as an obnoxious incel, someone who believed he deserved to have everyone bend over backward to satisfy his unrequited needs. But once he meets the Bride he becomes a humble white knight. One of the more distinctly modern pieces of messaging in the film is of the subjectivity of beauty and the injustice of beauty standards, a thread that comes to a head when Bale's monster performs a musical routine referencing Peter Boyle's performance in Young Frankenstein that seems to suggest the audience is the monster for having laughed at Peter Boyle.

Bale's monster is referred to as Frankenstein, Frank for short, by the way, both a nod to the fact that the monster's name and the scientist's are frequently confused as well as the idea that the monster is, in fact, Victor Frankenstein's son so, therefore, he'd naturally carry on the family name.

Frank and the Bride hit the road as the film becomes an extended riff on Bonnie and Clyde which many reviewers have compared to other Bonnie and Clyde pastiches like Natural Born Killers and especially Joker: Folie a Deux. Frank and the Bride are wrapped up in their own worlds, a bubble that's occasionally punctured when one of the simplistic, vicious denizens of our world attempts to kill or rape them. The great failing of this film for many who've viewed it is the lack of a credible world for these two characters to dwell in. They are invariably victims of a broadly villainous world whereas other riffs on the Bonnie and Clyde story at least devote some time to the idea that the self-absorption of the protagonists may do legitimate harm to innocent bystanders. This is is something Mary Shelley herself better understood than both Maggie Gyllenhaal and Guillermo del Toro. Shelley's original monster is by no means a saint.

Maggie Gyllenhaal's fundamental idea is to find the feminism of Frankenstein by taking its depiction of monstrousness as an allegory for the roles women are forced to play in society. But it's ultimately unsatisfying, as allegories often are, because the two things don't map comfortably onto each other. Mary Shelley was more interested in the sanity of self-creation versus the imposition of life. Her interest in this idea was held without obligation to sort characters into consistently moral or immoral figures. Ultimately, that makes her work a more sophisticated rumination on the human experience on a level most adaptations have been unable to approach. But at least Gyllenhaal's movie gives us some food for thought, even if it's mostly only accessible to those of us who have done our homework.

The Bride! is available on HBOMax.

The Movement of Soldiers

Happy Memorial Day. I watched Stanley Kubrick's 1957 film Paths of Glory again this morning, which Wikipedia labels as an "anti-war film", citing an article that no longer exists on TCM's website. I suppose it's a fair label. Maybe it would be more accurate to call it simply an "anti-hierarchy film." Surely any halfway accurate depiction of World War I, particularly trench warfare, will inevitably be an anti-war film. I can't imagine putting a spin on that epitome of the absurd and the grotesque to make it seem reasonable.

The cinematography, the compositions, all of it is just absolutely phenomenal. It's so short and so smooth, it's almost impossible to stop watching once you've started. Sure it's a worthy way to honour the sacrifices of soldiers in war, though some might debate me on that. Is it better to remember true glory or to recall the fact that most soldiers in wars like that are victims in uniform? The film's razor sharp satire of the officers shows the ridiculous lengths of delusion they indulge in to maintain the narrative of war as an honourable endeavour in which the officers are the purest manifestation of virtue. It's just a magnificent film.

Last night, I was watching Oshima Nagisa's 1983 film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, a film that I did hear talked about in Japan, unusual for a film so old or transgressive, though it's mainly due to the fact that its score by Ryuichi Sakamoto, who also starred in the film, continues to receive so many accolades around the world. I don't get the impression many in Japan have actually seen it. It certainly hasn't raised David Bowie's profile in Japan, whose name my more homophobic detractors, having heard he's my favourite singer, tended to pronounce as "David Boy", perhaps to conflate him with Boy George.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence never feels like a realistic depiction of a prison camp. Oshima should certainly be commended for showing the infamous brutality the Japanese showed to prisoners of war but the action often feels more like S&M role play than true abuse. It's clearly a movie primarily intended for Japanese audiences. Bowie once commented that Oshima gave extensive direction to the Japanese actors while telling the western actors to "Please do whatever it is you people do." Bowie himself, despite my admiration for him, could have used more direction as he tends always to come off as David Bowie in a military uniform, particularly when he does pantomime. I know his idea was probably to show his character's attempt to evoke normalcy in an abnormal situation but his professional quality pantomime is more reminiscent of Bowie as a performer than of the character he's playing.

Kitano Takeshi is about the only one who comes off as really authentic in the film. I don't know if that makes it a bad film but maybe not an appropriate film for Memorial Day.

Paths of Glory is available on MGM+ and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is available on The Criterion Channel.

True Sue

Self-insert Mary Sue characters are widely seen as a hallmark of bad writing but sometimes they really work, a prime example being 1993's True Romance. Christian Slater's character, Clarence, is clearly modelled on screenwriter Quentin Tarantino himself. He's a movie nerd and Tarantino has talked about how he based Clarence's first meeting with a movie mogul on his own idea of himself in such a meeting. Throughout the film, characters express their boundless love and devotion to Clarence through words and deeds. Dennis Hopper as his father accepts a lethal beating and Patricia Arquette as his love interest, Alabama, is pummelled ruthlessly by James Gandolfini to protect him.

It's worth noting that Tarantino, when he wrote the screenplay, had been estranged from his father throughout his life. I doubt he had a girlfriend at the time, either, and, anyway, no girlfriend is as perfect as Alabama whose devotion to Clarence is inexplicable as written, created almost entirely by the chemistry between the performers and the work of director Tony Scott, the music of Hans Zimmer, and the costume department. Patricia Arquette looks so good in that movie. In True Romance and Lost Highway she's got to be one of the most stunning actresses in film history. How can Clarence be so lucky? Is it plausible? Maybe not, but it's really sweet.

The main reason Tarantino's Mary Sue works is the sheer cleverness of the dialogue. It may not be realistic for Alabama to fall for him so completely so suddenly but it's endearing watching them bond over Sonny Chiba movies and Elvis Presley.

The film bears a lot of resemblance to David Lynch's 1990 film, Wild at Heart. Both are about a pair of young lovers, one of whom is obsessed with Elvis Presley, and the girl is beautiful and devoted. Somehow the couple in Wild at Heart, as weird as they are, come across as more plausible. Both movies also use a Chris Isaak song.

I always had the impression that Lynch admired Tarantino more than Tarantino admired Lynch but I wonder if Tarantino wasn't influenced by Lynch at least a little.

True Romance is currently available on Netflix while Wild at Heart continues to be Lynch's most elusive film.

Sonnet 1993

Galactic dances stomp the shaky stars.
Expanding time has popped balloons of silk.
Escaping roosters head for chicken bars.
Researchers offer birds their dolphin milk.
Encouraged mammals dive for marble dimes.
Diversions stop the miners chipping cork.
Another page was soaked with troubled times.
Another beef was found engorged with pork.
Beside the station stands a troupe of dames.
They carry tickets meant for Saturn ships.
Intrigued reporters take their secret names.
But no-one's handle's worth a hundred chips.
Casinos cash the savings hoards of whales.
Policemen found it stashed in giant pails.

Is This The Cure?

I was watching this new Olivia Rodrigo video yesterday, thinking how endearing it is she likes the Cure so much, particularly for an old Cure fan like myself (don't tell Morrissey). She's referenced the band a few times in her songs and she performed onstage with Robert Smith the two songs she seems to like best, "Friday I'm in Love" and "Just Like Heaven". But this new song would seem to reference an earlier Cure song, the title track off the Pornography album from 1982. It's the one time a Cure song makes any kind of reference to the band's name, concluding a narrative about sexual escapades that have left the participant(s) jaded and desensitised with the statement that "I must fight this sickness, find a cure." Rodrigo's lyrics seem to refer to a relationship or relationships that she ultimately finds unsatisfying despite the effort she's put in. You could read it like she needs an actual cure to a psychological affliction or like the standards of modern romantic love will never match the level of passion or sincerity she imagined listening to Cure songs as a child or teenager.

YouTube's algorithm decided to follow up this Olivia Rodrigo video with the new Rolling Stones video, "In the Stars".

Yes, that's a new song, released this month. The Stones have de-aged themselves. We're at the point now when spellcheck should really know "de-aged".

Maybe the Stones and Rodrigo are on the same record label these days and that's why the algorithm chose it as a follow up but it was also fitting. Rodrigo's song is from a young artist seeking to communicate with the work of an older artist while the Stones are clearly trying to connect with youth. Whether it's to-day's youth or their own past is debatable. I looked at the comments section on YouTube, filled with people either praising or deriding the special effect. One or two people wondered if any young people came across the video and thought this was a new, young band. I don't see any comments that would indicate that.

It's an interesting song, not as great as anything they produced since before the mid '80s. Ideas about things "in the stars" seem to be cropping up lately here and there. Maybe people are concerned about fate. Maybe it's just the Cthulhu lobby again.

You know, throughout human history it seems like we've been looking forward to the day when we can divest ourselves of the disgusting and painful physical body and dwell in a place of eternal youth and beauty. It's starting to seem like Heaven can one day be built and you can live there, if you have the money, or whatever currency turns out to be viable in this new ethereal plane.

That Man

I think Michael Keaton is the best actor ever cast as Batman. Everyone who's played the character since kind of imitates him. Well, who else would they imitate, Adam West? But the boldness of the decision to cast an actor known primarily for comedic roles resulted in a baseline complexity for the character. When Vicki Vale points out he's "not exactly normal" and he replies, "It's not exactly a normal world," it's an exchange not only supported by every frame of the film but one that seems to convey a deeper meaning. In no other film is Batman so weird. It's in his costume, too, especially as the film has aged. They may have been trying to make Keaton look like the imposing hulk Batman is in The Dark Knight Returns but to me he looks like teru teru bozu, little white dolls Japanese kids make to ward off rainy days.

They have round heads and a skirt of tissue paper or cloth. It's because, for whatever reason, Keaton's headpiece is very large and round in the movie so when he's running around with his cape unfurled and his arms down at his sides he looks sort of like a doll.

It's oddly cute yet also somehow spooky and perverted. But there's so much underlying kink in Tim Burton's best movies. Typically the villains are more interesting than Batman himself. I'd say this is the film version in which Batman succeeds in nearly being as intriguing as his foe.

But it's hard to compete with the Joker, whoever's playing him, and Jack Nicholson was the first actor to make people realise what a great role it is. If one looks at him now side by side with Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix, rather than as preceding them in a kind of evolution, it's a little easier to see what he brings to the table. His Joker is an older man's Joker, more self-possessed, less driven. It was doubtlessly Nicholson's own personality bleeding through but the impression his Joker gives is of someone who's been through a lot in his youth and is just happy to be in a place at the end of it all where he doesn't have to give a shit. Both Ledger's Joker and Phoenix's Joker seem like they've got something to prove, Nicholson's is just having a ball.

A Good Place for Obnoxious People

Sam Raimi has used the venerable genre of the desert island scenario to discuss modern socio-political tensions in 2026's Send Help. He does so in a way more complicated than you might expect and it's a film refreshingly free of sympathetic characters. It's basically a cage match between two of the worst examples of both sides of the aisle. It really put a smile on my face.

When Linda (Rachel McAdams) complains about the the systemic sexism that led to her getting passed over for the promotion to vice president she'd long ago been promised, her coworker, another woman, barely seems to listen and kind of shrugs. Another coworker comes by talking about karaoke and Linda tries to invite herself along. Her coworkers awkwardly end the conversation.

Linda's new boss, Bradley (Dylan O'Brien), makes crude jokes about Linda behind her back. He's a spoiled young dick but when he says to her she lacks the people skills a vice president needs he's clearly right. This kicks off a see-saw series of escalating extremes. In one scene, Bradley or Linda does something obnoxious or psychotic that you would think clearly establishes them as the villain and then, in the next scene, the other character does something even worse. Raimi matches this lack of a moral centre with the delirious, cartoonish style he's famous for. Some people complained about the obvious cgi of the boars Linda hunts on the island but the complaints miss the point. These boars are far more expressive than real boars would be because they fit the extreme, stylistic tone of the film. They're more like Deadites than animals.

On the island, Linda has the edge on Bradley because she'd trained and studied in the hopes of becoming a contestant on Survivor. We know this because Bradley and his bros are seen laughing at her audition video on the plane. Bradley gets his comeuppance when he clearly lacks any of the survival skills necessary to get by on the island. Yet he still acts like he's God's gift to Linda. One exchange of dialogue I particularly like is when she points out he'd be dead if not for her and he replies smugly, "Yeah, and then where would you be?" causing her to ask with real consternation, "What does that even mean?" He never seems to realise that what he said was nonsense. Meanwhile, Linda starts to take on a resemblance to Kathy Bates in Misery.

Send Help is available on Hulu in the US.

Her Best Feature

A teenage girl is horrified when her best friend becomes a demon in 2009's Jennifer's Body, which Roger Ebert described as "Twilight for boys." Which is a really funny thing to read at the end of a long Wikipedia entry in which its director and screenwriter spend a lot of time talking about how they wanted to make this a feminist subversion of a male dominated genre. I enjoyed the movie. Its screenplay by Diablo Cody is peppy and occasionally insightful and it's always a pleasure seeing Amanda Seyfried.

It's funny she's supposed to be the unsexy nerd of the duo comprised of herself and Megan Fox. Megan Fox is pretty but, for my money, Seyfried is by far the more beautiful. But in any case, they're both beautiful girls which makes it odd that the movie tries anything like the dynamic it does: the popular hot girl and her mousy best friend. Well, Seyfried did dress as a mouse in Mean Girls.

Her character's nickname in this movie is "Needy", an indication of the abuse she cheerfully puts up with from Fox, the titular Jennifer. The two survive a fire at a tavern that kills nearly everyone else. The band playing at the venue is headed by the evil Nikolai Wolf (Adam Brody) who lures the already obnoxiously narcissistic Jennifer into the woods to perform an unspeakable demoniac ritual to upgrade her into a real demon.

I liked how the populace of the town builds a false narrative around the fire in which the band, which fled the scene almost immediately, is cast as heroes. It reminded me of Donnie Darko and Ghost World and I sympathised with Needy for having to be surrounded by idiots.

The film supports two alternate interpretations, one in which Jennifer becomes a succubus, killing one boy after another to maintain her power, and another in which Needy is losing her mind and turns her friend's repulsive personality into hallucinated demoniac antics. There are things which go unexplained, like the fact that Needy seems to have a psychic connexion with Jennifer. This kind of reminded me of Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt but mostly the story reminded me of Carmilla and American Werewolf in London.

Jennifer's Body is available on Netflix.

Wise Mollusc, eh?

It's only been a few years since the UK declared that octopuses are sentient beings and already there's a pro-octopus propaganda film on Netflix. 2026's Remarkably Bright Creatures stars Sally Field as a woman who works as a cleaning lady at an acquarium. She befriends a captive octopus, not knowing about his intelligible thoughts voiced by Alfred Molina. It's a sweet little film, even if it might come from the Cthulhu lobby.

Lewis Pullman, son of Bill, is also in the movie as a drifter, Joan Chen has a small role, and Colm Meaney plays the proprietor of a convenience store. He's also Sally Field's love interest in a subplot. It turns out Meaney's just seven years younger than Sally Field. It made me want to watch Deep Space Nine. I'm glad he hasn't gotten roped into the Alex Kurtzman Star Trek stuff. Or has he? I haven't been watching.

The performances are good across the board. Field's character is struggling with the loss of both her husband and son and Lewis Pullman and the octopus help her work through it in surprising ways.

Remarkably Bright Creatures is available on Netflix.