Ad Nauseam

I am a sucker for space movies. The first one I ever saw, when I was a kid, was a curious little clunker called First Spaceship on Venus, made, if you can believe it, in East Germany. It was silly, stupid, poorly done, but I was nine and I was hooked. Then I saw Forbidden Planet, and I was hooked for life. I think I've seen just about every space movie ever made, from Melies to Kubrick and beyond, including classic ones like 2001, the original The Day the Earth Stood Still and the original The Thing; dopey and pretentious recent ones like Interstellar and Contact; pretty good recent ones like Gravity and Sunshine; nice-try-near-misses like Pitch Black and Event Horizon; and very good ones like Alien and Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris.

And so, when I read about the new Brad Pitt movie Ad Astra, which was receiving good reviews and Oscar buzz, I dragged my son to the mall to see it. I should have saved myself the time, the thirty-four dollars and the aggravation of trying to get a teenager to do anything with me on a Saturday night. In a word, Ad Astra was dreadful. As in the Neil Armstrong film First Man, the director made just about every wrong choice he could have, and the script was awful. How anyone allowed lines like "I can't go to Mars with you," and "I'm on my way to Neptune" to get onto the screen is as mysterious as deep space to me. 

About forty minutes into the film I ceased caring whether Brad Pitt ever found his father or not. We were beaten over the head so many times with the son-in-search-of-missing-father routine that, in fact, I hoped he wouldn't just to spite him. The incessant internal monologues were aimless, poorly written and, eventually, anesthetizing. Again, as in First Man, the actor and director chose, for some unfathomable reason, to strip the main character of nearly all emotion, rendering him uninteresting and unengaging. Brad Pitt's facial expression never changes, and the repeated resort to the cyber psychological evaluation only served to reinforce the fact that this was not a human being so much as an extension of technology and the result of bad parenting. His character feels somewhere between Nicholas Cage's drunk in Leaving Las Vegas (which, apparently, Brad does) and Robocop. 

There was a motif of flashbacks to his former life when, hard as it is to believe, he was happy, but his devotion to his job trashed that. Now, usually in the case of a character whose past is catching up and whose regrets are haunting him, we care about his emotional health and his prospects for redemption. Not this time. There was so little in Brad's character to involve us emotionally that it made no difference to me whether he ever saw either his father or his ex-wife again. And when, finally, having returned from Neptune he meets up with her in a coffee shop, the insignificant morphs into the unintentionally comic.

Right around the time I stopped caring about whether Brad would find Tommy Lee Jones, I realized that Ad Astra is a remake of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The only clever invention of the film is that it turns Conrad's seeker and the crazy Congo recluse Kurtz into father and son, thus opening the floodgates for an unstoppable elegy of remorse inside Brad Pitt's head. There are so many closeups of the movie star's face that I began trying to count the visible pores in his nose, since there wasn't much else to occupy me. But I digress...

The choice of Donald Sutherland as the ancient astronaut who is supposed to accompany Brad to Neptune was mystifying. He was far too old for such a trip to be in any way credible and, in fact, the first thing he does when he gets to the lunar base is to have a heart attack. (Why the geniuses who chose him didn’t see this coming is puzzling.) This is when his character gets to utter the immortal line, "I can't go to Mars with you." When Brad makes it to the moon he goes on a rover excursion to the Mars launch base, only to be - get this - attacked by lunar bandits in hot rod rovers. Now, I ask you: Where did these anonymous Mad Max hijackers come from? How did they get to the moon? Where do they live? Where do they park their rovers? And most puzzling of all: How hard can it be to find bandits on the moon? Do they occupy some secret crater that no one knows of? Are they being protected by a corrupt local sheriff? This sequence was not just improbable, it was ridiculous. Banditos on the moon? You've got to be kidding me. They don’t even have water there let alone tequila

I won't say much about the special effects and art direction, though that is what I enjoy the most about space movies. But in Ad Astra, they were really quite conventional and showed me nothing that I had not seen done, and done better, several times before. Even fifty years ago Kubrick's Space Odyssey technology was more impressive on a technical and design level, and Ridley Scott's spaceships in Alien were far better than those in this new 80-million-dollar film.

I could go on citing the film's foibles, and I think I will, touching only on the most egregious ones. Brad Pitt manages to stow away on a Mars rocket. And how does he do it? By swimming through an underground lake on the moon (we are never told where the water came from) and climbing up into the rocket's exhaust mere seconds before it lifts off. When he gets into the air lock, the three crew members try to subdue him, resulting in (a) weightless Kung Fu fighting and (b) the deaths of all three of them. I’m sorry to be the one to point it out, but at this point Brad's character is guilty of at least three counts of negligent homicide. But this fact seems either to have escaped the filmmakers' notice, or it simply doesn't concern them, since all that matters is getting Brad, now alone, to Neptune. 

By this time we have learned that his father, Tommy Lee Jones, has, thirty years before, commanded an expedition to the edge of the Solar System in search of intelligent life beyond. In the process, he has gone wacko and murdered all the other members of his crew. This makes him a serial killer, another fine point of morality which escaped the filmmakers, though it does introduce a like-father-like-son theme. Both of them, no matter what we think of their sufferings or their exploits, are murderers, and anywhere back on Earth they'd be facing life in a super-max prison, which makes the long schlep to Neptune look like a Sunday stroll in Griffith Park.

En route to Mars, the commander of the top-secret ship in which Brad is being transported decides to stop to help a stranded Norwegian science vessel (a Norwegian spaceship?) over Brad’s rather limp-wristed objection. When they enter the ship, which everyone in the audience knows they should not, they are attacked by – get this – the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. I’m not making this up, folks: The ships’ commander has his face eaten by ravenous weightless monkeys.

Well, they finally find each other, Brad and Tommy, out by Neptune and there ensues some of the most inept and pointless dialog you will find in modern filmmaking. Most of what Tommy Lee says is pedantic and meaningless, and the only thing that Brad contributes of any originality is a single carefully framed tear. This is supposed to make us think that he has finally dealt with his grief and begun a new chapter in his emotional life. Nonsense. One tear doth not redemption make.

This sequence is the intellectual and emotional climax of the film. The entire extravaganza comes down to a single line muttered by Tommy Lee: We are all we have. Is this something no one ever thought of before? Did we have to go a billion miles into space to discover this? Is this all that Tommy’s character gleaned from three decades of total isolation: that we need one another? What were the filmmakers thinking?

I won't tell you what happens when they finally decide to go back to Earth together, to face, I hope, a judge and jury, but let me say that it is as inconsequential, predictable and chock-full of contradictions and improbabilities as everything else in the film. When Brad finally coaxes Tommy into his space suit, which must be thirty years old, it looks almost exactly like Brad’s suit. Hasn’t the technology improved in three decades? And this raises other questions in the inquiring mind: What did he eat for thirty years? Did he brush and floss? Didn’t he run out of toilet paper? Presumably, having killed everyone else on board there was more for him, but for thirty years? Three decades with no companionship, no one to talk to, nothing but himself, and Tommy's character, while a bit melancholy, is still focused and lucid? Anyone under those circumstances would long since have gone completely nuts and probably killed himself. At least Kurtz had the company of his adoring minions. But not in the alternative universe of Ad Astra. Once again, the father-like-son motif rears its head: These two creatures, whatever else they may be, are not human.

Then, of course Brad makes the long solo trip home (since Brad in this movie, like Sandra Bullock in Gravity and Matt Damon in The Martian) cannot be left to die in space. In space, it seems, movie stars are not expendable. Having suffered through the agonizing trip to find his father only to lose him again, Brad does make it back to Earth, though, oddly, he programs his spaceship to take him to the Moon. It seems the computer was off by 240,000 miles since Brad lands near (I think) Lake Mead where he started, a stone's throw from Vegas. It is there, I suppose, that he finally reunites with his ex in a coffee shop which clearly is not Starbucks. What a pity the writer didn't take advantage of this chance to make a devilishly clever pun. If he had, at least I would have had something to relate to, since Brad went to the stars and my thirty-four bucks went to him. 

Ugh! I thought Interstellar was bad with its dust bowl and bookcase, but Ad Astra nearly put me off space films forever. 

Union, Joker, Hong Kong and Hypocrisy

Voting is under way for the Writers Guild leadership positions. I have already cast my vote for the opposition slate, for reasons which I have explained in two previous posts. The Guild needs new leadership and must return to negotiations with the talent agencies so that its members, especially the young members, can get back to the business of earning a living. However, while I am hopeful of a change I am not sanguine about it. The solidarity mentality pummeled into our heads is a powerful anesthetic, and the entrenched leadership with its fifties labor union mentality will be hard to deracinate. Still, I have voted and hope for the best.

I would like to make here a point which I have forborne to do in the past. I hesitated, I shall be frank, because of my fear of reprisal, for which I apologize. It has become so clear to me that the Writers Guild now exists primarily for the sake of television writers that the implication of this shift can no longer be avoided. Just today a prominent Guild member, in writing to support the current leadership, admits that we must recognize that "TV issues are going to determine our life in the next decade."

As a feature writer, this leaves me out in the cold. The last strike and the current labor action have largely ignored the needs of feature writers, who increasingly have little in common with their television colleagues. This is more than a matter of emphasis; it represents, to my mind, a bifurcation in the interests of the Guild. For this reason I believe that the Guild itself should split into two parts, a screenwriters guild and a television writers guild, and devote equal resources to servicing the needs of both sets of writers. (Those who work in both media can be members of both wings.) This is the very kind of cultural shift for which I argued in my recent post on the Guild, and I believe it is time we Guild members began this discussion. The entertainment industry is changing, and this is the sort of change in our thinking that we ought to consider.


I have just read three reviews of the new Joker movie. One declares it a masterpiece, another an "aggressively terrible" film, and the third splits the difference at great length calling it a brilliant but failed attempt at psychoanalysis and social commentary. Opinion is equally divided on Joaquin Phoenix's performance, which (the critics apparently are unable to decide) is either glorious, gratuitous or implacably ghoulish. I have never seen a Marvel Comics movie and never wanted to, but given this schizophrenic hoopla about Joker, which is already being cast into the murk as Oscar bait, perhaps I will break my rule so that I may judge for myself. I will let you know.

I may mention in passing that this film appears to be yet another example of the phenomenon I discussed in my post about binge-worthy streaming TV. The Joker character, a secondary villain in the Batman series, has now become the protagonist of a film, elevated from an execrable villain to an object of curiosity and even of sympathy. It is a cultural development which I find troubling for what it says about the state of our social consciousness - we grasp now at role models precisely because they are anti-heroes of an unredeemable sort, admired for having sold or surrendered their souls. Mark Twain once said that Satan was admirable because he was the spiritual leader of four-fifths of the human race and the political leader of all of it. He was, of course, being facetious, but it seems his remark is no longer a joke.


I follow the Hong Kong protests with great interest. No matter where you stand on this story, you must admire the sheer courage of the, mostly, young protesters in defying the Communist Chinese monolith and demanding something as fundamental as freedom. Today the students of Hong Kong staged a boycott of classes, a tactic which I applaud and with which I can identify, since we did the same sort of thing in my school days. In that case we were defying the American military-industrial-political monster that was destroying the culture of Vietnam and devouring the lives of our friends. In some ways, the struggle that the Hong Kong protesters face is even greater. Communist China is not only an anti-democratic tyranny, it is a leading military power and also a leading economic one. And that means that other nations, democratic nations that ought to know better, are reluctant to criticize the police state's creeping oppression of Hong Kong because they have so much money invested in China. It is crass, cowardly self-interest turning a blind eye to a minority's courageous call for freedom.

This rather reminds me of the civil rights struggle in the Sixties in the South, when an oppressed minority put everything on the line for the sake of freedom, while the invested powers, North and South, tried to maintain an immoral status quo for the sake of stability. And while stability is desirable for economic and political reasons, it is never to be valued over the basic human right which underlies all human progress - the right to liberty and self-determination. I watch in dismay as our own government, which is so deeply in debt to China that it may never extricate itself, remains mute or largely so while the brave people of Hong Kong teach us the lesson we ought to have learned in the 18th century: If you buy stability at the price of liberty, you deserve neither.

On this score, let me repeat a suggestion I made after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting. At that time, I urged students to organize a nationwide school boycott until the paralytic political class changed the gun laws in this country to help ensure the students' safety. Walk out, I argued, and stay out until your schools are safe to attend. Do not march lemming-like into classrooms that are open targets for lunatics who should never have gotten guns in the first place. Demand absolute background checks, deny guns to anyone with a history of violence or mental illness, hire veterans as armed guards in schools, institute a ban on private ownership of all military-style weapons and ammunition, and launch a national gun buy-back campaign to get rid of at least some of the 400 million guns in America.

The young people of Hong Kong are giving us a brilliant example of how to organize and implement mass protests in the 21st century. They are risking their lives and freedom for the values that our young people take for granted. And so I plead once again with students: Use your smart phones and social media not as sources of mindless entertainment, but as tools to create a movement in your own interests - the interests of your safety and your lives. Walk out of school and stay out until the mad culture of gun worship in this country is quelled, and you can go safely back to your most important business, the business of education. Without fear.


Finally, there were several stories in the news today that make it clear that the intolerance of the Hollywood left for dissent is not a fabrication of the conservative mind. Two prominent actors have demanded the publication of the names of Trump donors so that "we will know who we don't want to work with." This is shameful. To refuse to work with people with whose politics you disagree is exactly the same as refusing to work with them because of their race, religion, gender or class. These Hollywood liberals do not realize the utter hypocrisy of their position. In flaunting their so-called progressive mindset, they are, in fact, joining the very ranks of the race-baiters and blacklisters whom they claim to despise. The personality of the president aside, the right to free expression and association remains sacred, whether it makes you uncomfortable or not.