Like I said before friends and neighbors, everything I know I learned from the movies. So you can trust me on this.
My quick and dirty review of Project Hail Mary
Andy Weir’s novel The Martian was a pretty good reimagining of Robinson Caruso…only this time on the Red Planet. Weir’s later sci-fi epic, Project Hail Mary, was superior to The Martian in depth, complexity and sheer story telling prowess.
The Martian was made into a decent man-against-the-elements adventure flick. The just released Project Hail Mary ranges several light years beyond that in ambition and production values.
Listen, I like Matt Damian as an actor. And he did exactly what he needed to do in The Martian.
But if you had told me even five years ago that Ryan Gosling was going to evolve into a versatile and accomplished actor – and that he was born to play the coward turned rescuer of worlds in Project Hail Mary – I’d have laughed in you face.
I was wrong.
Oh The Times never changes
Full disclosure: I love The New York Times. Hell, I even have a Times pension by virtue of The Gray Lady owning The Gainesville Sun during most of my career there.
Oh, and I think the Times obits are well written and interesting as hell.
But goodness they do tend to be elite snobs at The Gray Lady.
Opening up the Saturday Times I scrolled down the extensive list of Today’s top stories and came across a very nice obituary:
“Nicholas Brandon, Beloved sidekick on ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’ Dies at 54.” This accompanied by a large, enduring photo of a smiling Brandon sitting at his desk, a bottle of Aquafina water close to hand.
Yeah, I never heard of him either.
But to be fair, I was never a Buffy fan. Nor have I seen the handful of movies he made, let alone his Kitchen Confidential TV series.
But The Times enlightened me.
“Mr. Brendon played Xander Harris, a close friend and unrequited admirer of Buffy. A review…described Xander as a would-be Don Juan who had a ‘tragic hairstyle’ — shaggy bangs falling over his eyes — and emanated a premature sense of his own attractiveness to girls.”
Okie dokie.
But it occurred to me that another actor of, um, some note had also just died. And for some reason his passing didn’t make the NYT’s top stories of the day list.
No, I had to click on ‘sections,’ and then scroll down a long list of options to ‘obituaries’ to find out what The Gray Lady had to say about Chuck Norris.
Who has been, you know, starring in movies and stuff since the 1970s.
So what did The Times have to say about Norris?
Well, that he “channeled his skills as a martial arts black belt into a durable acting career that left film critics largely unimpressed but delighted millions of fans…”
And that as “Norris was well aware that no one would mistake him for a latter-day Laurence Olivier.”
And that a 1997 Times review of one of his movies found him “about as emotional as a statue.”
Oh, and that Norris “understood fully that he was not going to land on any list of great actors.”
Which is not to say that the Times obit focused solely on his inability to act.
It also threw in, for good measure: “A self-described conservative Christian, Mr. Norris said in 2012 that if President Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president, were re-elected, ‘our country as we know it may be lost forever.’”
Don’t get me wrong. I do come not to praise Chuck Norris.
And he was certainly was no Laurence Olivier. I mean the guy sold more tickets than Olivier ever did.
All I’m saying is that Norris deserved a better send off than the Times snobs allowed him.
Both the tone and the placement of his obituary struck me as a classic example of Gray Lady snobbery.
But what do I know?
Oh, yeah, I forgot. Everything I know I learned from the movies.
FreeGNV 