Project Hail Mary is a perfect example of a movie made after a book where the movie does not even come close to do the story justice. I read the book about five years ago. Here is my book review. I gave the book a 4-star review and called it “one of the best and most satisfying science fiction stories I have ever read.”  I still stand by that.

The movie Project Hail Mary got great reviews from the critics and they are already talking about Oscars. I really don’t think so. It’s a fun movie, Ryan Gosling did a good job as the lead (and mostly only) actor, but most audiences will not be able to follow the story.

I think it is a solid 2-star movie. As a matter of fact, if you didn’t read the book, I don’t recommend watching the movie. It’s 2 hours and 36 minutes long, and my wife was fidgeting in her chair next to me. I knew she didn’t know what was going on. Many of plot twists didn’t really sink in. The environment of the Eridanis was just glossed over, and viewers probably didn’t even understand the last few minutes of the movie. There is a lot of science applied here, and that too did not take hold.

If you did read the book, and science fiction is your thing, you will enjoy the movie for what it is. It will put some images into your head that weren’t there before.

And you will enjoy the soundtrack. It might get some awards for that.

A friend of ours (RW) had repeatedly recommended that we watch Pan’s Labyrinth, since it was one of the best movies he had ever watched. So it was on my list, and when our family was looking for a good movie to watch on the evening of Thanksgiving day, we decided to try it. That was after almost an hour of browsing various good movies and watching trailers, only to reject one after the other. Pan’s Labyrinth is also on a list of the “125 best movies of all time you have to watch before you die”, so how can we go wrong?

Guillermo del Toro’s film El Laberinto del Fauno is a Spanish film in the Spanish language, with English subtitles. We did not expect that we’d be “reading the movie” when we chose to watch it on the evening of Thanksgiving.

In Spain in 1944, fascism under Franco is in full swing. Military all over the country is brutalizing the population. Resistance warriors fight back as much as they can, waiting for the war to end. The captain of the local military force is an exceedingly brutal man. He married a woman with a young daughter, Ofelia. The woman is pregnant, expecting the captain’s baby. Ofelia does not accept her stepfather. She lives in a fairytale world, full of magical creatures like giant bugs, fairies, an old faun, and many other “monsters.”

While the story unfolds of how the resistance fighters try to undermine the regime with the help of the general population, and how the military thugs use sheer sadistic brutality against their own people, Ofelia tries to get out of her impossible situation by the magic of the fairy tale world that only exists in her mind.

Pan is a Greek god which the Christians later borrowed to embody evil, like Satan. He had horns, goat legs, fur, hooves, and a grotesque overall appearance. Such is the faun that appears to Ofelia and leads her through a set of impossible tasks to accomplish her own return to the throne of her true royal father and to live her life as the princess that she really is.

Pan’s Labyrinth brings a little-known aspect of World War II to life, namely what went on in Spain under Franco, while Hitler and Mussolini did their own murderous and ruinous deeds. Is Pan’s Labyrinth a great movie you have to watch?

No.

Does it, in my opinion, belong on any list of great movies you have to watch?

No.

There is not a spark of happiness, the good guys don’t win and gloom lives on. Pan’s Labyrinth is a dark and mystical tragedy that, after watching it, left me numb.

My Penguin Friend is inspired by a true story.

A young Brazilian fisherman named João lives with his young wife Maria and their young son Miguel in a picturesque fishing village. On his birthday, Miguel asks to go out fishing with this father. The weather is not good, but João can’t say no to his son, and they row out. Soon a storm overtakes them and in the struggle to survive and get back, Miguel drowns. João’s heart is broken. 

The story skips forward several decades, and João and Maria still live in the same house. They are old now, but it appears that they have not touched Miguel’s room. They live in eternal grief with no apparent joy left in their lives. Just the hard work of a fisherman. 

One day, João rescues an injured penguin from an oil slick, brings him home, carefully cleans his coat, and feeds him back to strength. The penguin stays for a while, recovering, and a village girl gives him the name Dindim. Maria is not all that happy about the new pet in her kitchen, but she sees João blossoming with joy about being able to care for an animal that needs help. 

Penguins are migrant birds, and one day Dindim leaves for the south. To everyone’s surprise, and most of all to João’s, Dindim comes back the following winter to stay. And the next winter. João’s life is transformed. He has a penguin friend. 

I found out later on IMDb that 10 rescue penguins portrayed Dindim in the movie. Approximately 80% of the scenes feature real penguins. For the remaining 20%, where real penguins would face safety risks, CGI was used for 15% of the shots, while animatronics accounted for the final 5%.

This is a feel-good movie with a simple message, a little corny at times, but a nice change to the usually Hollywood fare of fast action and superheroes. It’s just about a man and his penguin friend.

Sam is a well-adjusted 17-year-old high school girl. Her father invites her to go on a backpacking trip in the Catskills, a couple of hours north of New York City. Scheduled to come with them are Chris’ best friend Matt, and his teenage son. But during the morning of the departure, Matt and his son have a huge fight, and Matt ends up going alone. His marriage is shot, and his son is suffering from it.

During the trip Matt and Chris are the immature ones, and Sam keeps an even keel. What 17-year-old girl wants to go hiking with her middle-age dad and his friend? Sam apparently does, and she actually enjoys herself. Until Matt does something very wrong.

Good One is a slow-moving film. I have hiked in the Catskills and the Adirondacks. It’s remote, green, muggy, buggy, often muddy, with rough trails and steep hills. It’s a place to get away from it all. Good One brings that to us. There is no sound track. Just crickets and frogs and bugs and talking. Most of the talking is done by the two men, unloading their problems, their regrets, their hurts, and the girl does most of the listening. The movie creates this slow walking mood that gradually turns into unease.

Then Sam takes charge.

Thelma (June Squibb) is a 93-year-old woman who lives alone. Her grandson Daniel (Fred Hechinger) looks in on her from time to time, helps her with her computer, and has her back when she needs him. One night she gets a frantic call from Daniel, telling her he is in prison and needs $10,000 in cash right away to be sent to his lawyer. But it wasn’t Daniel. She falls for it.

When she realizes she has been scammed, she takes matters into her own hands. With her friend Ben (Richard Roundtree) she embarks on a journey around town to get her money back.

Thelma is lighthearted comedy with some feel-good elements and a lot of fairly demoralizing scenes. It casts a bright light on the plight of our seniors. They often live alone, even when they have a loving family, like Thelma, and watch their peers die away one by one. There are a number of scenes in an assisted-living home where we get to glance into lives of the tenants.

I am currently going through this with my own parents, who I always remembered as capable, independent, active and healthy. That is no longer the case, and they need care, lots of care in lots of situations. Our modern world does not offer good solutions for the elderly, and due to improved health care, the elderly are getting older.

Thelma was funny and light, but I walked out of the theater somber and almost depressed. It made me think of my own life, and the fact there there is a lot less sand in the top of my hourglass than there is in the bottom, and it made me wonder how much Thelma there is in me already.

If the objective of the movie was to make us think about our lives – I guess it met the objective.

Maestro tells the story of the life of Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper), the conductor, composer and pianist, who is considered to be one of the most important conductors of his time. He was also the first American-born conductor to receive international acclaim. The story mostly focuses on his love and tumultuous marriage to Felicia (Carey Mulligan), a Chile-born actress with considerable fame of her own.

Produced by Stephen Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, directed and written by Bradley Cooper himself, the movie was nominated for seven Oscars and many other awards.

I knew very little about Bernstein’s life and acclaim, other than that I used to buy his records of the symphonies of Mozart and Beethoven in my early twenties, when I listened to a lot of classical music. Bernstein were the records I went for when given a choice.

I didn’t know he was bi-sexual, and maintained affairs with women and men throughout his life. You might imagine that that complicated his marriage and added endless drama to his life. And that’s what you feel and experience when watching Maestro.

Then there was the endless, constant smoking. Bernstein was a heavy smoker all his life. I could almost smell the smoke coming out of the movie, it was so present in every scene.

But in the end, I didn’t think I really learned much about Bernstein through the movie itself. The first half was slow and in black and white – for some reason they thought it would make sense to show black and white when there were only black and white movies in the 1940s and 1950s. It was slow enough  that I picked up my phone and checked Wikipedia for Bernstein’s life, biography and highlights, and I think I learned more about the man from what I read in the Wiki article while the movie was rolling, than I learned from the movie itself.

The story focuses on Bernstein’s sexuality and it skips quickly between the phases of his life without much substance to the story or noticeable transitions. We know he pined for his wife and mourned her death, but the jump from suffering while his wife was ill to his teaching performance some ten years later was abrupt, as if they wanted to get the movie over with.

My favorite scene was the conducting of the London Symphony Orchestra at the Ely Cathedral in 1976. I really showed Bernstein’s passion for the music and his talent. For those of us like myself, who do not know much about orchestral music and particularly conducting, the whole thing looks more like magic than craft. I trust it is craft. The scene was amazing, and that scene is worth watching the entire movie for.

When I checked IMDb afterwards, I found out that Cooper actually did this live himself and he said the following about it:

That scene I was so worried about because we did it live… I was recorded live. I had to conduct them. And I spent six years learning how to conduct six minutes and 21 seconds of music. I was able to get the raw take where I just watched Leonard Bernstein [conduct] at Ely Cathedral… And so I had that to study.

Maestro is a mediocre film with moments of genius and passion sprinkled around in it.