Space Cadets

 

PROJECT HAIL MARY (C+) - I tried to refrain from rolling my eyes during the first hour of this naive space opera about a bumbling American on a remote -- and presumably doomed -- mission to rescue the stars in the solar system. It is mainly a vehicle for Ryan Gosling to be silly and charming while surrounded by neat CGI tricks and master puppetry.

It takes nearly an hour -- of this 2-hour, 36-minute spectacle -- for Gosling's astronaut Ryland Grace to coincidentally run into a another spacecraft and life form (small world!) and, like a kindergarten teacher, find ways to communicate with it. (The creature resembles a spindly rock, so Grace calls it Rocky. Kute!)

 

As my partner pointed out, this earnest production seems like a film for children, or maybe adults who have given up on the idea of fending off even the slightest challenges to their intellect. The first hour is mostly set-up, with Grace plucked from his lowly gig as a middle-school science teacher to help the government(s) figure out the substance that is implanting itself between Venus and the sun (and happening to all but one of the other stars in the solar system), such that the cooling of Earth in the coming decades will render the planet mostly uninhabitable. Clever idea, but it plays out in ridiculous fashion, with Grace, in flashbacks, plopped into a remote lab to do science experiments while bureaucrats look on and their ringleader, the sarcastic Eva Stratt (Sandra Hueller), mocks him and treats the whole project like goofy game show.

None of that works well. It is a mess brought to you by filmmakers who dabble in wacky animation (Meatballs and Legos) and the Spider-man franchise (co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller), or the universe that encompasses "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Cloverfield" and "World War Z" (co-writer Drew Goddard, a Los Alamos, N.M., native), all based on a novel by Andy Weir ("The Martian"). That's quite a creative soup, but then again, too many cooks ...

Gosling is amusing enough, as he can't help but be. I guess we're supposed to laugh at all the tools and tricks he has on board his spaceship, which is light-years from civilization and on a mission designed for no possible return flight. (Though I suspected late in the first hour that Grace and Rocky might have a hack up their sleeve. We'll see.) It's not just improbably but virtually impossible that this shlubby science teacher would master all the controls of the massive spaceship and have the wherewithal -- with no training -- to blithely traipse through spacewalks. (But it's just a movie!)

We paused 45% of the way to save the rest for a second night. We agreed that we could fast forward through much of it to just get to the ending. Except we didn't deploy the remote, and I kind of half-watched a lot of the rest of it. I had no desire to sit through more of Grace and Rocky's child-play that resulted from their interstellar meet-cute. (At one point they tap out the theme from "Close Encounters" to each other. Huh?) There were a few audible sighs during the final 90 minutes.

And so, this goes on and on. The flashbacks pile up, but the dribs and drabs of backstory can be tedious. Meanwhile, Grace and Rocky develop a relationship with the depth and banter of a mid-level sitcom. Somehow they find the time to pursue a solution to the problem they were both tasked with solving. They develop a computerized method to translate each other's voices into their own language, so they can chat. Thus, Rocky talk like Tarzan. Or maybe Mork from Ork. In fact, brace yourself: Whenever the music swells and talk gets serious (about their survival), the depth of emotion rivals that of a Very Special Episode of "Mork & Mindy." 

I suppose this is just what the Hollywood doctor ordered for a populace that wants to pretend it can rise to the challenge when fate plucks one of us from obscurity to save the universe. Our Prime Video training will have served us well. 

BONUS TRACK

Would you believe the filmmakers and Paul McCartney stoop to including the Beatles' "Two of Us" on the soundtrack? Yes, things get that treacly. Much better was an opening sequence in which a Manson-bearded Grace is roused from his induced coma, and he flails around the cabin to the tune of Kris Kristofferson's hangover anthem "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down."

That '70s Drift: Do You Remember?

 A pair of documentaries from HBO Films:

EARTH, WIND & FIRE (B-minus) - Here comes the documentary about Earth, Wind & Fire that you didn't know you needed. And it's still questionable whether this two-hour effort -- subtitled "to Be Celestial and That's the Weight of the World" -- was essential filmmaking.

 

Helmed by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson of the Roots -- and the man behind the impeccable "Summer of Soul" -- this exercise follows music guru Maurice White, who left the Ramsey Lewis trio's drum kit to explore his "Afrofuturism" and Zen philosophies to create Earth, Wind & Fire, one of the most popular bands of the 1970s. White, of course, is a complicated and flawed hero in this story (mainly tyranny and infidelity), lending this a VH-1 "Behind the Music" narrative arc. 

Shortly after the band left Chicago and headed to Southern California around 1970 -- and after White overhauled the fledgling group -- the songs started to click, culminating in the No. 1 hit "Shining Star" from the 1975 album "That's the Way of the World." (Thompson is more coy with the group's most enduring hit song, dropping a ghost of a sample at the very beginning of the film and then using it at the end to punctuate Earth, Wind & Fire's universal acclaim.)

White was abandoned as a 5-year-old boy in the South -- his father died, and his mother left him with a neighbor so she could go off to Chicago and start a big family with a physician husband. That trauma is revisited repeatedly during the documentary, a way to explain and forgive White's aversion to marriage and his distant relationship with the children he fathered with multiple women. Thompson employs crude animation and stale stock footage to go back in time and try to juice up what is an average story of a famous band. (A few clips click, like the fun Afro Sheen commercial from the Black is Beautiful era.)

The director does assemble an impressive array of talking heads (White, who died in 2016 from Parkinson's, is seen in archival clips), including bandmates Philip Bailey and Ralph Johnson; contemporary Booker T. Jones; Stevie Wonder (who admits that he cribbed from "Shining Star" to write "I Wish"); recent artists H.E.R. and Anderson Paak; White's longtime partner Marilyn and two of his sons; and the Obamas, who refuse to mask their joy and nostalgia over the joy's of Earth, Wind & Fire's music. (One demerit for Thompson is the way he races through screen IDs and other critical information, too quickly for the average reader.) We get a solid sense of the passion behind the band, including the stage presentations and elaborate costumes during the heyday.

Some talking heads dance around White's infirmities (there was a battle over royalties). As an example, when White broke up the group in 1983, he had others break the news to his brothers in soul. As one person puts it: "Maurice did not like confrontation." Another counters: "He was chicken-shit." White would soon be humbled by his solo-release face-plant (please, do not subject your ears to his limp cover of "Stand by Me") and Bailey's uber-smash with Phil Collins, "Easy Lover" (accompanied by the horn section that Collins had poached from the bickering band).

There is no doubting White's talent, and the way the band cruised for a solid decade of hits. (White also produced and co-wrote a hit for the Emotions, "Best of My Love.") And Thompson certainly has established himself as an expert archivist and chronicler of culture. But you'd have to appreciate the music to fully enjoy this documentary.

BANG MY BOX: THE ROBIN BYRD STORY (B) - Remember the glory days of community cable television? In New York, the queen of R-rated late-night local content in New York City was the gal in the crocheted bikini, Robin Byrd. This 79-minute documentary does justice to that specific moment in time. 

 

A tag team of directors weaves several story lines into the tight format. There is the launch of the show -- hosted by Byrd (with her girl-next-door blond shag) and featuring many performers from the porn industry -- and its initial popularity in the late '70s and into the 1980s. The middle portion pays tribute to the show's support of gay rights during the AIDS crisis, albeit in a formulaic way. One through line involves Byrd's videotaped archives, and the debate over whether to turn them over to academia. A coda emphasizes the legal challenges she was involved in and the fight to protect the First Amendment.

Byrd turns 70 during filming, and she has gained a lot of weight, no longer confident enough to don a skimpy swimsuit. And she is coping with her longtime partner, Shelby (more than a decade older than her), who is declining due to dementia. Extra credit to the filmmakers (Jyllian Gunther and Stephanie Schwam) for dealing with it matter-of-factly rather than mawkishly. He was tolerant of her bisexual adventures, and their scenes together here are sweet instead of sappy.

There is not much at stake here, and the production values are fairly humdrum, but there is an inherent charm in the lo-fi DIY ethic that gets celebrated, and Byrd herself is a bittersweet leading character.

BONUS TRACKS

EW&F with their mega-hit "Shining Star":

 

The "Byrd" trailer:

Song of Ourselves

 

TIGUEX (A-minus) - What a wonderful ode to an American city.

Albuquerque resident Raven Chacon, originally from the Navajo Nation across the Arizona border, has a worldwide reputation for his musical work. In 2022, Chacon won a Pulitzer Prize for his composition "Voiceless Mass," for organ and ensemble.

In September last year, he took on an epic task. Across 10 hours, he and hundreds of collaborators fanned out across Albuquerque to perform the multi-faceted "Tiguex," a sprawling composition made up of 20 movements performed sequentially from dawn to dusk, from the peak of the Sandia Mountains to the banks of the Rio Grande. It involved more than 200 musicians and vocalists.

 

The movement called "Tiguex" was exhaustively documented, and Chacon now gets credit as director of the 85-minute film presentation of his work. If a film could be both stunning and low-key at the same time, this is it. It shares some DNA with the genre of mostly wordless quasi-documentaries, usually about rural areas, such as Michelangelo Frammartino's "Le Quattro Volte."

The genius of the film -- and the individual pieces crafted by Chacon -- comes in the clear-eyed view of Albuquerque as a city. The depiction is neither fawning nor dismissive. It highlights the simple pleasures of the city -- its gritty landscape, the modest downtown, its Latin traditions, its pioneering role in ballooning -- and finds the heartfelt beauty in all of it, turning the pillars under an interstate into an echo chamber for a soaring cantata. 

There is minimal narration -- from a British-accented host at public radio KUNM-FM, which chronicled the whole day -- as the images unfold. These are some of the scenes we are treated to:

 

A cellist performs along the banks of the Rio Grande in a "Ballad for Two Cellos"; one of the instruments simply floats lazily down the river. Horseback riders lope along the bosque trail. A lone trumpet bookends the film from atop Sandia Peak. A ragtag procession snakes through Old Town. Guitarists and singers jam on a rooftop. Drummers and bassists perform "blast beats" outside a nuclear museum. A mariachi band performs merrily aboard a flatbed trailer. Eight low-riders rev engines and blare sirens along Route 66. A choir on the West Mesa. A trombonist performs solo as a hot-air balloon lifts off from a schoolyard. 

It all culminates in eight singers wandering amid the pillars under I-40 at sunset intoning the ethereal sounds created by Chacon and co-writer Marisa Demarco. It is at this point that you might levitate in the cinema.

I have lived in Albuquerque for 24 years, and this is the adopted metro area I'm familiar with, and the film surely speaks to longtime natives. This ain't the "Breaking Bad" tour. It comes from the perspective of an artist who appreciates the ordinary loveliness of your average city, with its quirks and detours. It de-emphasizes the trite, myopic topics -- the tough weather, the perceived crime issues, the percentage of unused office space  -- and merely walks its streets and trails. Many of the performances feature residents as audience in the mix, making this seem like just another day in the neighborhood. It's quite an understated accomplishment. 

BONUS TRACK

Here is the raw video of the 10-hour presentation, which doesn't do justice to the 85-minute film:

With a Vengeance

 

IS GOD IS (A-minus) - This propulsive debut film -- about adult twin sisters seeking revenge on the father who set fire to them and their mother when the girls were little -- is marred only by its pulpy bloody final 20 minutes. Until then, its script is flawless and its depiction of sisterly bonds profound.

 

Aleshea Harris adapts her own play, exhibiting a sure hand, and carrying over some of the best elements of the stage (mostly the dialogue) without sacrificing a cinematic flair. She has an ear for  patois -- the girls us "finna" in place of "gonna," and as one of them intones early on: "Dis destiny-type shit." The callbacks to literary stylings pair nicely with the hectic modern soundtrack (see below).

Kara Young (above left, as Racine) and Mallori Johnson (as Anaia) are believable out of the gate as sisters who share not only the fertilized egg that they came from but also an uncanny mind-meld, in which they complete each others' sentences and communicate telepathically (through words splayed on the screen). After their father torched their mother in a bathtub, leaving Racine with scars on her arm and Anaia facially disfigured, the girls were abandoned to the foster-care system, told that their mother had died.

But, no, their mother Ruby (Vivica A. Fox, below) -- whom they refer to as God (because Ruby made them) -- summons the girls, now adults, to her bed chamber with instructions to "Make your daddy dead. ... Real dead." While Anaia is reluctant to set out on a mission of vengeance (massaged as a mission from "god"), Racine is all-in, assuring her sister that she will take care of the dirty work. 

 

The pair embark on a classic road trip through the South, meeting up with the crazed preacher named Divine (a delirious Erika Alexander) who took up with their dad after his arrest (and bore a son), the lawyer (Mykelti Williamson) who represented their dad back in the day (and was himself disfigured by his demonic client), and eventually their dad (Sterling K. Brown), who now lives in a mansion with a trophy wife (Janelle Monae) and another set of twins (aimless young-adult sons).

Along the way toward the climax, the girls' banter is sharp and incisive, and the set pieces with the preacher and the lawyer are laugh-out-loud funny. Harris cleverly skewers religious fundamentalism and the criminal-justice system, on a broader mission herself to explore the moral implications of exacting vengeance for an unspeakable act. Despite the heavy themes, the film is often loose and fun, with Racine and Anaia mostly having a blast. We get to peel the layers of each twin and learn that there are a lot more differences than we suspected -- and not just the obvious physical disparity that has given Anaia a lifetime of angst over her looks. Racine might have the pretty face, but she also exhibits a dark side, eager to lash out at the slightest provocations.

This all skates along effortlessly until the final reel, and the showdown with their father's family. I'm not familiar with Harris' original play or her first draft of a screenplay, but I have to believe that a Hollywood producer intervened, demanding a decidedly Tarantino tilt to the final 20 minutes. Like Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," the bloodbath veers off the rails, and a near-perfect movie turns into just another reckless action flick. Harris does wrap things up in a rational manner, and the denouement is a mere blip in a powerful film.

I LOVE BOOSTERS (Incomplete) - I guess Boots Riley just ain't my jam. I devoted a little over an hour to the latest provocation from the writer-director whose previous film, "Sorry to Bother You," also brought ham-handed lunacy to an anti-capitalist diatribe.

 

Candy-colored and slap-dash in production, "I Love Boosters" is an adolescent's idea of a polemic. It relies on a ridiculous mid-movie twist that is just as silly as the gimmicks Riley tossed out in "Sorry to Bother You." If you don't mind cartoons, contrived storytelling and far-fetched plot twists, then settle in. (And who am I to argue with a full house of millennials, who hooted and laughed throughout the screening this week.)

The Boosters, who steal couture clothes and resell them, are brash young women (depicted from left above), Sade (Naomie Ackie), Mariah (Taylour Paige) and Corvette (Keke Palmer), determined to outsmart the evil designer Christie Smith (a scrawny Demi Moore) and make rent money while dismantling the bourgeois system that exploits workers (in China) and brainwashes the masses. But the plot is almost beside the point; instead, the brash visuals dominate the proceedings. Riley seems to have taken his cues from childhood screenings of TV episodes of "The Monkees," both aesthetically and philosophically. Christie Smith works out of a high-rise apartment that is built on a slant, so it's difficult to keep one's footing at the 45-degree angle. Yes, it's that level of klever.  

Perhaps Riley's worst offense involves the sound mix. He commissions a corny circus-like soundtrack of tuneless noises from Tune-Yards, much of which obscures the dialogue, some of which is mumbled. I must have missed half the "jokes" here. There was nearly an hour left to endure, and I just couldn't bear to sit through the rest. I peeked at the Wikipedia plot summary, and I'm glad I bailed; it gets goofier.

It's a shame, because Palmer and the rest of her co-stars (including Lakeith Stanfield and Eiza Gonzales from "Baby Driver") are animated and committed. But too often they are tripping over Riley's awkward dialogue. Some people won't mind the mess. 

BONUS TRACKS

"Is God Is" uses music masterfully, with a wide range of genres and eras. A key car scene features Racine head-banging to Death Grip's "Guillotine": 

 

The film shares an energy with "Miss Me" by Leikeli47: 

 

The film reaches back for some '70s funk vibe, courtesy of the retro "Groovy Flute" by Manu Dibango:

 

Finally, a beautiful gospel song from the '60s, revived in 2012, Shirley Ann Lee with "There's a Light":

Just a Hunch

 

A PRIVATE LIFE (B-minus) - Jodie Foster is the perfect late-career star to shepherd this off-kilter light-hearted dramedy about a psychiatrist in Paris who feels compelled to investigate the suicide of one of her patients, with frustrating results. 

The movie is corny and derivative, but it is somehow held together by Foster -- speaking passable French as Dr. Lilian Steiner -- and by a weird puzzle-like structure that manages to cohere until its droll ending. It's almost an obsessive homage to not only old film noirs but also 1970s cop/private-eye TV shows like "Columbo," "Rockford Files," or "Police Woman." 

Foster's Lilian struggles to connect with or pay close attention to her clients. She insists on recording her sessions on digital tapes, despite the long-outdated nature of the technology. She reconnects with her ex-husband (a wonderfully wry Daniel Auteuil) and feuds with the dead patient's husband and daughter, played by the impeccable Mathieu Amalric ("If You Don't, I Will" and Wes Anderson ensembles) and wide-eyed Luanna Bajrami. The father and daughter understandably have issues with Lilian's treatment of a woman who was driven to suicide; Lilian doesn't buy the suicide story (an overdose from a prescription penned by Lilian) and suspects the father and/or daughter of murder.

Virginia Efira ("Madeleine Collins") is seen in flashbacks as the dead woman, Paula. The scenes from her therapy sessions have a dream-like quality, often including voice-overs, as if she is speaking from the grave. The tape of her final session goes missing, and the husband might be involved in a break-in at Lilian's office. There is also a disgruntled patient of Lilian's (Noam Morgensztern), who is suing her for years of pricey sessions wasted, when all it took for him to quit smoking was one session with a hypnotist. 

Lilian goes to visit the hypnotist, to be put under a spell (she is trying to cure the inexplicable onset of tears that beset her), and this is where the film wanders into the territory of a Woody Allen farce. Writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski is on thin ice with this and other trite touches that occasionally pop up along the way. (We get the requisite scene of Lilian distracting a worker in order to sneak into the files that include the name of Paula's aunt (the arresting Aurore Clement ("The New Girlfriend") in a cameo. Then she does a similar thing late in the film.) We also see Lilian, during her hypnotic trance, flashing back to Nazi-occupied Paris, where she and Paula play together in an orchestra and are lovers. Visually, Zlotowski is  fond of shooting up at or down from spiral staircases, in a lazy wink at Hitchcock.

In anticipation of this current release, we sampled the previous film by Zlotowski, "Other People's Children," which was watchable but which we found to be "tripping over the line between legitimate drama and Hallmark shmaltz." Here she has two co-writers. And most important, she has a game Foster, who does a fantastic job of rolling out a world-weary ennui disrupted by a genuine desire to prove her hunch (and to essentially uphold Lilian's professional reputation). Lilian also has a strained relationship with her son, Julien (Vincent Lacoste), and a Freudian aversion to her own grandchild.

It helps if you don't take this too seriously. It is an airy caper that doesn't always make sense. (The final reveal didn't need to be as confusing as it plays out, either.) But the puzzle does eventually come together, like a satisfying two-part episode of "Murder, She Wrote." 

BONUS TRACKS

From the film's climax, a little ditty from J.J. Cale, "Don't Go to Strangers":

 

And this snippet from the closing credits, "Wander 12" by Rob Lahana: