Universal will open Steven Spielberg‘s Disclosure on 6.12.26.

Is there a slight possibility that, for once in his career, Josh O’Connor might play a suave cool cat with a good haircut?

Phil Lord and Chris Miller‘s Project Hail Mary (Amazon/MGM, 3.20) deserves approval points for originality, I suppose, and for not dumbing down the science — it’s mainly for sharp sci-fi nerds. It’s not for none-too-brights like me, I can tell you that much. I always hated science class.

It is, however, a kind of bruh love story between Ryan Gosling’s Ryland Grace, an extra-brilliant junior high school science teacher who’s been forced to join a years-long mission to somehow save the earth from freezing to death…I feel a tad blurry from the effort of trying to recall the particulars…and Rocky, the rock-crab alien, who vaguely resembles a small-scale The Thing.

I did, however, find myself emotionally responding to a scene in which Gosling hugs the plastic-encased Rocky. Not quite on the level of Henry Thomas hugging E.T, but in that general ballpark.

But that was just a brief respite. Because overall watching PHM (156 minutes!) sent me into a vague depression pit. An “oh, no” feeling began to take hold. Anticipating a slight comprehension struggle, I read the Wiki plot synopsis of Andy Weir’s “hard” science fiction novel twice before settling into today’s 1 pm screening. And I still felt a bit lost.

The science is gobbledygook, but it helps to familiarize anyway.

The scientific villain of the piece — the bad, earth-freezing organism that consumes electromagnetic radiation and which will cause our sun to cool — is called Astrophage. (Different from Arbitrage, no relation whatsoever to decolletage.) It also helps to know what “the Petrova line” is, although I’m still not sure what “a dim infrared line from the Sun to Venus” actually looks or behaves like. (Is it a bit like the infrared laser beam that Auric Goldfinger used to sexually terrorize Sean Connery?) You should also get hip to xenonite, taumoeba and the spelling difference between Eridani, Rocky’s home planet, and the native Eridians. (Shouldn’t they be called Eridanians?)

The bottom line is that Project Hail Mary made me feel…well, not exactly like a dumbass but a bit like that kid in the back of the seventh-grade classroom who always flunked pop quiz tests.

I knew early on that I would feel vaguely distanced from this effing film. I didn’t hate it but vague discomfort certainly flooded my system. I wound up feeling sorta kinda nothing. Okay, I felt relieved when it finally ended. Because I really hate, hate, HATE films that make me feel this way…films that gun the brain engine and converse with exotic, ahead-of-the-curve techno-jargon. PHM sure as shit does this.

So I began looking at my watch around the one-hour mark. And I kept checking it every 15 minutes or so. I checked it seven times in all.

Apart from the serving of feel-good “I love you, man” vibes during the second half, what is this fucking thing really? It’s basically a two-hander that’s a great, big, fat science-project brain teaser.

Sandra Huller doesn’t count. She’s basically flashback filler. In a big scene she sings Harry Styles‘ “Sign of the Times”, which I didn’t immediately recognize. I knew the singing scene was coming, and I, being a clueless, old-school dumbass, thought it might be the Petula Clark version…nope.

This film really filled me with alienation. Existential gloom. I sat there thinking about death, and how being dead would be one way, at least, of avoiding any more Phil Lord and Chris Miller films.

Part of the reason I didn’t much care for PHM is Ryan Gosling’s over-acting. But it’s also Gosling himself…those vacant, close-together eyes. The shouting, the geek laughter, the slapstick physicality. What it is about this guy that I find so cloying, so irksome, so alienating? I haven’t really liked Gosling in anything since La-La Land.

From Owen Gleiberman’s 3.12 Variety essay, “The Oscar Best Picture Winners Have Long Been a Sign of the Times — This Year Even More So.”

“It is not the purpose of this column to predict which [Best Picture nominee has the winning edge]. But this much can be said.

“If One Battle After Another wins, it will play as an affirmation of the power of movies to tap our most traumatic social and political anxieties and elevate them to a cathartic place. There may be no Oscar winner in history that has owned the zeitgeist like One Battle After Another.”

HE correction: There may be no Oscar contender in recent history that has owned the fraught and frazzled progressive psychology under Trump authoritarianism like One Battle After Another.

14 months ago I posted HE’s top 30 films of 1986. I’ve since rewatched Bruce Beresford‘s Crimes of the Heart, and I hated it so much I turned it off after a half-hour. So I took it out and popped in John Carpenter‘s Big Trouble in Little China and Clint Eastwood‘s Heartbreak Ridge.

So here’s HE’s top 23 films of ’86, along with 8 good ones that were compromised by minor flaws.

It’s very hard to accept that 1986 was 40 effing years ago.

(1) Oliver Stone‘s Platoon
(2) James Cameron‘s Aliens
(3) Oliver Stone‘s Salvador
(4) David Lynch‘s Blue Velvet
(5) Jonathan Demme‘s Something Wild
(6) Michael Mann‘s Manhunter
(7) Neil Jordan‘s Mona Lisa
(8) Woody Allen‘s Hannah and Her Sisters
(9) David Cronenberg’s The Fly
(10) Jim Jarmusch‘s Down By Law
(11) Mike Nichols‘ Heartburn
(12) James Ivory‘s A Room with a View
(13) Jean-Jacques Beineix‘s Betty Blue
(14) Spike Lee‘s She’s Gotta Have It
(15) Adrien Lyne‘s 9 1/2 Weeks
(16) Hal Ashby‘s 8 Million Ways to Die
(17) Randa Haines‘ Children of a Lesser God
(18) Martin Scorsese‘s The Color of Money
(19) David Anspaugh‘s Hoosiers
(20) Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge
(21) Jamie Foley’s At Close Range
(22) Sidney Lumet‘s The Morning After
(23) Clint Eastwood‘s Heartbreak Ridge

Generally Good but Slightly Second Tier:

(24) Roland Joffe‘s The Mission, (25) Claude Berri‘s Manon of the Spring, (26) Tony Scott‘s Top Gun, (27) Fons Rademakers‘ The Assault, (28) David Zucker‘s Ruthless People, (29) Paul Mazursky‘s Down and Out in Beverly Hills, (30) John Hughes‘ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, (31) John Carpenter‘s Big Trouble in Little China.

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According to V. Renée’s 9.2.13 post on www.nofilmschool.com, John Sturges‘ Bad Day at Black Rock (’54) was shot in two aspect ratios — old CinemaScope (2.55:1) and flat Academy (1.37:1). The MGM guys weren’t completely confident that CinemaScope would work out so they wanted a flat version as a backup alternative.

This was exactly the same thinking behind the dual-aspect-ratio filming of Daryl F. Zanuck and Henry Koster‘s The Robe (’53).

The flat versions of The Robe and Bad Day at Black Rock were never released, of course, although the boxy Robe is viewable as a PiP feature in Fox Home Video’s 2009 special edition Bluray.

I would love, love, love to see the boxy version of Bad Day at Black Rock. I’m presuming it’s been trashed or otherwise lost, but this is the kind of thing that fans of classic films on Bluray tend to wet themselves over.

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I didn’t like Grand Funk Railroad back in the day. Too metal, too muscular, too macho, too Michigan. But now they sound pretty good, or this signature song does at least.

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HE will be catching a Project Hail Mary screening tomorrow afternoon….let’s let it lay until commentary is appropriate.

THR‘s Pamela McLintock has posted an encouraging report about increasing movie theatre attendance among Zoomers and therefore a hopeful trend as far as the future of brick-and-mortar cinemas are concerned.

McLintock: “Zoomers had been written off as anti-moviegoing since they were the first generation to bond 24/7 with an iPhone or other device. [And yet] social media has them craving a collective experience, resulting in a rise in theatergoing among those born between 1997 and 2012.

Comscore’s Paul Degarabedian: “GenZ is ironically drawn to the classic analog experience of going to the movie theater. They are able to blend this traditional activity with their digital lives, using theater outings as fodder for social engagement.”

This is all well and good except for one teeny weeny thing: Zoomers are not only plagued with short attention spans, but are sorely undereducated as far as exposure to rich, transcendent classic cinema is concerned. They regard the ’80s as ancient history and have barely delved into the late ’60s to late ’70s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” era. And you can totally forget even a passing GenZ awareness of films made in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s.

If taste is a result of a thousand distastes, as Francois Truffaut once observed, being undereducated or under-exposed to the really good stuff from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s (1986, don’t forget, was one of the greatest years ever!), it follows that Zoomers are incapable of having anything resembling good taste because they don’t know very much about what constitutes great cinema during the Mark Harris “Pictures at a Revolution” heyday. They just don’t know enough. Hell, they don’t want to know any more than what they know now.

I wouldn’t want to say that the vast majority of Zoomers, cinematically-speaking, are mentally smug chuckleheads who adore their own insularity and ignorance, but it sure seems this way.

And so they adore wank-off films like Sinners and Everything Everywhere All At Once and Deadpool & Wolverine and all the other cancer-causing shite out there. On top of which they’re wokeys, and so they believe in bullshit presentism (POCs costarring in historical European films set in the 1800s, 1700s and before).

Sidenote: The chart just below this paragraph is hilarious as boomers aren’t even tracking — their theatrical attendance is so minimal that they don’t even count any more. Dead to the world.