From Owen Gleiberman’s Project Hail Mary review, posted on 3.10.26:

“Project Hail Mary will likely be a hit, but [it’s] a cosmic adventure that feels diagrammed, if not programmed, to be The Movie We Need Right Now. It never stops figuring out ways to make you fall in love with it.

“Forgive me if I say it’s not very good.

“Ryan Gosling is a middle-school science teacher in nubby sweaters, because his research as a molecular biologist was rejected by the establishment as too radical. But it turns out that he was right about everything. When the sun begins to lose heat, he’s recruited by the powers that be in Washington, represented by Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), an official of stoic Euro command who’s the head of the Hail Mary project to save Earth.

“Gosling’s performance in the Earth sections is quite winning, [but] the film feels padded, whether it’s stopping in its tracks for Eva to do a full-blown karaoke version of Harry Styles’ ‘Sign of the Times’ or spilling over into a finale that doesn’t know where to end.

“The sentimental dilemma of whether Gosling, at one point, is going to go forward with the mission or turn the ship around to save Rocky the alien is string-pulling of a very generic order.

“Project Hail Mary will likely be a hit, but the movie we need right now — or, really, anytime — is one whose drama extends beyond its ability to push our buttons.”

Plus it runs 156 minutes, for Chrissake.

The Calvin Klein guys (women, gays) can produce this 1975 Playboy Centerfold-ish video with Dakota Johnson (something to do with CK’s “Spring 2026 Campaign”) and it’s all cool, chill and sanctified. But if a male viewer says “hey, this is tantalizing” and “it got my attention…hell, I’ve got half a stiffie”, he’s a sickening sexist dog.

Speaking of The Hollies, “Pay You Back With Interest” works as well as it does because of (a) the chimes (which kick in at 1:30 and again at 2:12) and (b) the lightly jazzy drum riff at the very end.

Sasha Stone’s recent Sinners pronouncement, to wit: “Wokeness isn’t about black movies. It’s about white people using minority groups to elevate themselves through virtue signalling.” Friendo retort: “Elite progressive whiteys haven’t praised Sinners with this motive in mind? Of course not. No wokeness to see here!”

Bottom line: “Sasha has taken Sinners, a movie that’s front-and-center about race and white oppression, and said that it’s NOT a movie about race and white oppression. PLUS she’s taken One Battle After Another, a movie that’s front-and-center about political fascism (something not bound by race), and turned it into a movie that’s ENTIRELY about race and white oppression.”

Last thing: “Sasha is laboring under the delusion that Sinners did better at the box office than OBAA because it’s ‘not woke.’ Uhm, sorry, wait…Sinners did better at the box office because it’s A FUCKING VAMPIRE MOVIE!!”

HE 3.7 sideview riff: There is irony in Sasha Stone, who is as anti-woke as they come (takes one to know one), pimping Sinners as God’s gift to cinema while excoriating the woke degradation of Hollywood movies that began eight or nine years ago.

The irony is that Sasha doesn’t seem to realize that Sinners — the movie itself, the critical acclaim for it, the apparent likelihood of it winning the Best Picture Oscar a week from today (Sunday, 3.15.26) — Sinners is the very quintessence of the malignancy that she’s been deploring since ’18 or ’19 or certainly since the Great Awokening of ’20.

Sasha replied a few hours later: “What you’re saying applies to One Battle After Another. Sinners is not about wokeness. Its success is not about wokeness. Absolutely not true. Sinners made more money, and has earned better reviews, both from critics and audiences, than any other film in the Best Picture lineup. One Battle After Another is a box-office failure with an asinine, simpleton plot. Wokeness isn’t about black movies. It’s about white people using minority groups to elevate themselves through virtue signalling.”

A couple of hours later Sasha posted a lengthier response on awardsdaily.com. Here it is.

Dead movie:

HE applauds the joint decision by director Tomas Alfredson and his producing colleagues to go with Seance on a Wet Afternoon as the title of Alfredson’s currently-lensing drama.

Alfredson surely understands that a sizable percentage of under-45 Millennials and Zoomers have probably never heard the term “seance”, much less used it in casual conversation. They might also feel challenged and possibly annoyed by the term “wet afternoon.”

The general tendency for decades has been to avoid titles that sound needlessly cultured and cultivated. Hence Taylor Hackford’s 1984 remake of Out of the Past — one of the most poetically haunting movie titles of all time — being dumbed down into Against All Odds.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon, the title of the 62 year-old Kim Stanley and Richard Attenborough film, passed muster with 1964 audiences, but education levels were higher back then.

Not to mention one “s” in disapprove and three uses of “i” in initiated.

Sent just before 1 am, addressed to the latest Gatecrasher roster — Scott Menzel, Jeff Sneider, William Mccuddy, Kristi Coulter, Bee Garner, Christian Toto, Chris Gore, Joran Ruimy, Edward Douglas, John Nolte, et. al.

Oh and by the way, I’m effing stoned right now (two gummies) so everything’s moving much more slowly than usual…a whole different bag in terms of perceptions alone. My mind wanders, dawdles and dilly-dallies.

Six days before the Oscars and this is it, bros…this is NOW — and it’s almost a kind of cliffhanger We really do have to weigh in with our Best Picture and Best Actor insights and persuasions.

Persuasions or intuitions or whatever…stomach-acid hunches, little devils and angels sitting on our shoulder, hairs standing up the back of your necks…here’s a final chance to be concise and forthright about the whole underwhelming ’25 and early ’26 season, and to hold high the Gatecrasher banner before it goes into seven or eight months of hibernation.

[URL for access to Gatecrasher ballot]

For the first time in a long time, there’s an actual genuine suspense element in two major categories. Talking about the last-minute Sinners surge, and Ryan Coogler and his co-producers possibly snagging a Best Picture Oscar…the buzz is humming but maybe just among the 4500 or 5000 souls who focus on this stuff.

Will Sinners take the Best Picture Oscar? While PTA has the Best Director Oscar sewn up, but…aahh, too much hyperbole.

All I know is that I was relatively uninterested in the’25/’26 award race. And then the BAFTA awards took place in London…bingo! When the John Davidson kerfuffle happened, everything changed.

If Sinners wins the Best Picture Oscar, no one will give any credit to Davidson, but he’s certainly been the key Oscar influencer for the last couple of weeks. Davidson blurting out the N-word more than once while Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were on-stage, I mean…that was seismic.

Please try to fill our your ballot and send it back by Wednesday, Thanks so much.

[URL for access to Gatecrasher ballot]

Jeffrey Wells, HE

Until last night I hadn’t even heard of Shane Atkinson‘s Laroy, Texas. Apparently it’s a primitive action thing about crude backwater Texas trash. Then again it costars Dylan Baker, which implies a veneer of intelligence.

It’s presumed that costar John Magaro, who mostly specializes in playing sensitive cerebral types (i.e., wimps), doesn’t play one of the primitives.

Pic opened at the Tribeca Film Festival almost 33 months ago, and then opened commercially via Brainstorm on 4.12.24. Mostly positive reviews all around, but it quickly died. I’m presuming it’s at least semi-watchable.

Indiewire‘s Christian Zilko: “Watching LaRoy, Texas is a lot like the seedy motel affairs that all of its characters seem to be having –two hours of fun, followed by a tragic feeling of emptiness and a desire for a shower.”

Trump and Netanyahu want this guy reduced to bony barbecue chunks within the next 48 hours, and preferably sooner.

No support or agreement implied. I’m simply stating a strategic fact. If you’ve taken the huge, irrevocable step of killing Ali Khamenei, Iran’s 80-something-year-old hardline supreme leader, and then a week or so later his 50-something-year-old son, just as much of a clerical hardliner as dad if not more so, steps in and replaces dad and says “meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” the son is fated to be slaughtered and butchered and turned into barbecued steer meat.

The basic principle is “in for a penny, in for a pound”.

My favorite Country Joe moment…a study in casually laid-back rockstar aloofness.

1. Adopting a certain yeah-yeah enthusiasm, Joe asks the crowd “so how you guys doin’ out there?” 2. Crowd: “Great!…yeah!…whoo-hoo!” 3. Joe quickly shifts into a kind of smooth-cat, half-bored attitude…”Oh, yeah?”

Even if The Bride! had opened a couple of weeks ago, Jessie Buckley still would have been locked to take the Best Actress Oscar next Sunday (3.15).

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