So to even begin a review of Project Hail Mary I have to first confront my ambivalence about its star, Ryan Gosling. He tends to get gushed over but for dubious reasons: Much as the world loved the Barbie movie (2023), I found it a big gob of pink bubblegum. It was fine, if you like that sort of thing—vacuous brand-name-based comedy. (Remember the Summer of 2023? The whole “Barbenheimer” thing? Was that only three years ago?) Ryan Gosling certainly had his comic moments as Ken. He’s great in The Place Beyond the Pines (2012) too. Maybe he should play bank robber/stunt-motorcyclists more often. Which leads us to Project Hail Mary, composed of, oh, approximately 95% Ryan Gosling on screen.
An easy description would be something like “It’s E.T. meets 2001 meets Contact meets Arrival meets Wall-E”—with a healthy dose of Steven Spielbergian moments, most in outer space. There are twists and turns that I won’t reveal, but I’ll note Gosling’s costar appears to be made of rather flexible rocks, hence the moniker “Rocky,” as in “Rocky phone home.”
Although comic, it’s not exactly funny. It’s sweet. My one-word review would be “Cutesy.” Hard not to quibble with the premise, from this Trumpian hellhole into which our nation has fallen: An intergalactic menace is threatening our sun, and to save it a great team of international scientists cook up a mission to travel beyond our solar system to find the fix. (Of course in our “real world” all the scientists would either be fired or under investigation for being “woke,” so forget the whole save-the-world mission altogether. For this review I consulted a team of scientists who confirmed we have a 99% chance of becoming the overweight humanoids of Wall-E by, say, 2035.)
Yet in the far-fetched fictional world of Project Hail Mary, they need a hero. For that they tap Ryan Gosling, who plays Ryland Grace, a high school science teacher who has a PhD and somehow manages not to yell at his students to put away their frickin’ phones. He’s reluctant to join this mission to deep space. I don’t blame him. What follows is heart-warming. Rather unlikely but heart-warming. Isn’t that what we all need at the moment?
So a friend turned me on to this new Apple TV series Widow’s Bay. It’s something of a mashup satire of horror/disaster movies, with pointed references to such classics as Jaws, The Fog, and many others.
A “dramedy,” the most fun of the show involves the quirky citizens of the quaint New England island Widow’s Bay. The main character is local mayor Tom Loftis, played by Matthew Rhys, performing admirably a role reminiscent of Murray Hamilton’s classic money-obsessed mayor in Jaws. Only Tom is more nuanced and complicated: He’s not exactly likable but you end up pulling for him anyway. He often says or does the wrong thing. His assistant, Patricia, is the funniest character, who bickers with Tom and plays passive-aggressive head games.
At times the humor is tongue-in-cheek. For instance, Tom is single, raising a rebellious teenage son (is there another kind?), and explains that his wife died “in childbirth”: The way he says it makes it seem suspicious. It’s either a throwaway explanation for his being a widower or maybe he’s lying and there’s a “secret” that will be revealed later. In another scene mayor Tom makes a scene at a local bar when he yells out, “There’s something in the fog!” That’s a tagline from the famous John Carpenter film of 1980, The Fog. And there is something in the fog, but the scene is played for comic laughs. Everyone stares at him and the fog quickly dissipates.
Episode 2 has a subplot in which Tom agrees to spend the night at the spooky local Inn that has a history of unnatural deaths: He does it to quiet the locals who are scaring away the potential tourists. Many clues make the connection between this spooky Inn and Stephen King’s notorious Overlook Hotel of The Shining (1980) fame. He has to stay in the Captain’s Suite, which has a particularly bloody history, shades of Room 237 from The Shining. He also meets a lovely young woman who seems rather aggressive with her come-hither looks, who invites herself over to his house, and whom he comes to believe is an incarnation of the Sea Hag—a ghost-woman who lures sailors to their deaths by sitting on their face.
It’s on Apple TV and debuts a new ep every Wednesday. Next week is the fourth episode of ten, so we’re not even halfway into the series. It’s a winner.
So I just read in the Dallas Morning News that only nine Texas summer camps are approved to open after last year’s Camp Mystic tragedy. Not having Texas summer camps is a tragedy in itself. The population of Texas is over 30 million so it’s an easy guess that only nine camps won’t be able to serve a great percentage of kids who want (and should) experience summer camp. So what are they going to miss? Childhood memories, for one thing.
I spent a couple weeks at a summer camp in the Hill Country near Mason, Texas many years ago—think I was in fifth grade. What I remember most: It was hot—baking hot, Sahara hot, summer-in-Texas hot. We panted like dogs, our tongues hanging out. At the end of every day we were sunburned and scruffy. Not at all like the many slasher movie summer camps such as Friday the 13th (1980) and its iconic Camp Crystal Lake. We didn’t have frisky camp counselors Kevin Bacon and Adrienne King (the original slasher-movie Final Girl) trying to sneak off to make out while we got away with murder. Nope, we were on a tighter leash than that.
Our counselors were all football-coach wannabes with fat necks, bulging biceps and bowling-pin calves who wanted to whip our little grade-school asses into shape. (And keep us so tired and worn-out we wouldn’t get into any trouble. It worked.) Although we played sports and had cookouts and ate hot dogs, it was less Bill Murray’s iconic Meatballs (1979) . . . .
. . . and more Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). More like Boot Camp than Summer Camp. We slept in bunkbeds in a long barracks building and you had to hide your stuff or your other little happy campers would steal it. But they had chocolate milk in the mess hall, which made it a little like Heaven.
Part Lord of the Flies as well: I remember one kid bawling that he missed his Mommy and wanted to go home. He was kind of a small kid and maybe people made fun of him but I don’t remember that at all: We felt sorry for him. The counselors said he had a bad case of Homesickness. Gone the next day, mustered out. Me, I’d be ashamed to be sent home for crying and didn’t want to get sent anywhere (unless perhaps a nice house with air conditioning) so I didn’t sniffle or mope. This was not a rich-kid’s camp. It was run by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic organization, and as I was a good Irish-Catholic kid I think I got sent there for free or a small fee. Some of the other kids were black and Latino inner-city kids from San Antonio, which gave more of a mixed, urban feel to the camper population.
It was survival of the fittest. Toward the end of Week One we did an eight-mile hike, in the middle of the day, when the air temperature in the shade was probably like 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Kids were dropping like soldiers in the Bataan Death March. But at the end of the hike we reached a swimming hole on the Llano River, one of the Hill Country’s limestone-bed rivers with cool, clear water. There were no floods that summer. The only safety measures I recall were roped buoy-barriers around the swimming spot to keep us from drifting downstream to the rapids. We didn’t have any kids drown, thank god. We ate s’mores and fashioned crude designs on belts in Arts & Crafts class. We made hand-prints in foil-pans filled with wet plaster. I was a small kid and somehow survived the kickball games . . . barely.
After two weeks I was ready to go home and back to hanging out at the suburban swimming pool we spent all our summer days at, eating Giant Sweet-Tarts and playing Marco Polo. Being out in the sun and heat and river water for two weeks was a good experience, toughened me up a little. I learned that if you were sunburned badly enough your skin peeled off in sheets. That was the first summer I went “camping,” which involved sleeping around a campfire in my friend’s backyard. Kids need time in the outdoors. We should expect the owners to run places like Camp Mystic safely, but I hope they don’t go extinct.
So since 1990 I’ve been a bit of a distance runner, have run 16 full marathons and 5 half-marathons, including today’s. The real treat this year: My daughter, Liliana, ran the Half-Marathon with me. She didn’t think she was going to make it and did great! It was chilly at the start but by mid-morning it was all blue sky and sun. Pittsburgh—The City of Bridges—is actually quite charming and scenic. Yesterday we visited the Andy Warhol Museum, though I rather doubt Andy ever ran their marathon.
So a friend of mine turned me on to the recent film (seen via streaming, from last year) Dragonfly (2025) that I knew nothing about. It stars the terrific character actress Andrea Riseborough as Colleen, a downtrodden British gal with no family or friends, no job, and a seriously jaundiced view of life. But she has one precious thing to make her life worth living: her big dog, Saber.
Saber is a costar of the film, in the animal world at least, although the human costar is Brenda Blethyn, who plays Elsie, a widowed woman living next door to Colleen in a council-house neighborhood in the north of England, an area that seems to signify the term “Broken Britain.” Jobs and money are scarce. Elsie’s middle-aged son is being threatened with being “redundant,” as in he’s on the verge of getting fired or laid off. (He seems frightened, uptight, not particularly warm and compassionate.) Elsie and Colleen are neighbors and hit it off, as Colleen befriends Elsie and helps to care for her. Meanwhile the only other thing in Colleen’s life is Saber, with whom she sleeps. (As I allow my beagle-mutt to sleep in my bed this made me connect with Colleen and sympathize with her, naturally.)
For about the first half of the film it’s a quiet, careful depiction of these two women’s lives. There’s a bit of mystery: As the viewer you’re suspicious of Colleen through some of her actions, and suspect she might be trying to take advantage of Elsie somehow, to either rob her or for some other reason. But she’s also caring and kind, so that suspicion seems mainly to arise from the mystery of intentions: Why is she being so nice to Elsie? What’s up with that? Which is itself a jaundiced view of the world: Why shouldn’t she be nice to Elise? When Elsie asks that very question, Colleen replies, “We’re neighbors. Neighbors should look out for each other.”
The final half of the film is heartbreaking and stunning. I won’t give it away. But as devastating as it is, it’s a fresh view of the world, not a rehash of superheroes, aliens, ghosts, monsters, and other silliness. The lives of Colleen and Elsie are heartbreaking but they seem real. At times it does seem like Grim & Grimmer, but it’s touching. That’s a good thing.
So as an aficionado of Old West histories I’ve stumbled onto a real gem: Paul Andrew Hutton’s The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History (2016). I should first mention that in the last month I’ve picked up and discarded several nonfiction histories of the West, two of them concerning the history of New Mexico. Why? They simply weren’t worth the reading time. A good history vivifies the past and helps you understand its importance events and cultural/historical ramifications, and it takes a certain kind of skilled writer to pull that off. While I was disappointed in these failed books I won’t name names: I’d rather celebrate good writing than nitpick bad. And as chance would have it, I happened to read a description of Hutton’s The Apache Wars and bought it, quickly became hooked. I’ve been binge-reading ever since.
Quotes about the book compare it to S.C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon and I second that, although I think I favor The Apache Wars over Empire. Both are quite good, both gripping page-turners, and both about Native American tribes of the Southwest: Empire concerns the Comanches while Wars obviously concerns the Apaches. Although their territories in the Southwest overlapped the two tribes were not in league, and were actually mortal enemies. They fought tooth-and-nail for dominance in the southern Great Plains. The Comanches essentially won and forced the (Lipan) Apaches into far West Texas, although the heart of Apacheria was actually western New Mexico and Arizona. (There were several bands of Apaches and the Lipan’s territory overlapped with the Comanche.)
The Apache Wars has an excellent structure to frame its detailed account of the conflict from 1861 to 1886, using the kidnapping of the white boy Mickey Free as its touchpoint. As with the Comanche wars, trouble between settlers and Natives began much earlier than that, as soon as the westward expansion heated up in the late 1830s and into the 1840s. For many readers the most famous and visionary depiction of this era unfolds in Cormac McCarthy’s classic novel of western frontier brutality, Blood Meridian (1985). There are passages in Wars that seem lifted straight out of Meridian, although it actually must have been the other way around: It seems McCarthy researched both Apache and Comanche history, and came across scenes that he used later in his description of the Glanton gang.
In particular is this incident detailing the actions of the mercenary Irishman James Kirker:
“In July 1846, Kirker achieved true infamy when he conspired with the leading citizens of Galeana, Chihuahua, to lure a mixed band of Chokonen and Nednhi Chiricahuas into town with promises of a peace treaty and rations. Negotiations were held between the Mexicans and the Apaches while Kirker and his men hid themselves. A pledge of eternal peace was secured and to cement the bargain a liberal disbursement of whiskey was provided. On the morning of July 7, while the Apache men lay in a drunken stupor after a nightlong fandango, Kirker and his land pirates slaughtered 130 Chiricahuas.
“Spybuck supervised the scalping, for his Shawnees had perfected a rapid technique. A neat circle was cut at the crown of the victim’s head. The scalper then grabbed hold of the Apache’s long hair and pushed off with his feet against the victim’s shoulders. A loud pop followed as the scalp came off. The scalps were taken to Spybuck, who treated them with some salt for preservation and attached them to long scalp poles. Each scalp was a debit against the treasury of the state of Chihuahua.
“Kirker marched his men into Chihuahua City in a grand procession headed by the governor and several priests, with musicians escorting them into the town in triumph. They carried the Apache scalps before them on long poles. In the fiesta that followed, the priests ornamented the front of their church with the scalps. “Opposite the principal entrance, over the portals which form one side of the square, were dangling the grim scalps of one hundred and seventy Apaches,” noted an English visitor, “who had been inhumanely butchered by the Indian hunters in pay of the state.”—Hutton, The Apache Wars, p20-21.
For those unaware of the stature of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, know that it was ranked by a group of editors/writers as the second best novel of the past 50 years (I believe Toni Morrison’s Beloved was #1). In it McCarthy does a masterful job of turning history and legend into an artistic epic that is both beautiful and awful. Hutton’s The Apache Wars, a nonfiction work, provides great context and understanding to this era, and reinforces the visions of McCarthy.
So Season 2 of the Netflix series Beef has dropped and is quite good. Think of it as The White Lotus meets Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019). It’s about a quartet of grifters using whatever nefarious arrows in their quiver to get ahead, the main one being an iphone snippet of a middle-aged couple’s old-fashioned “domestic dispute” (in the husband’s “man cave,” no less) caught on video by a much-younger couple.
Although everything is not what it seems is undoubtedly a movie cliché, it works to great effect in this season’s storyline. The most captivating character is Ashley Miller, played by Cailee Spaeny, who possesses the sweetest smile and the darkest heart. At first she genuinely seems to care about her boyfriend and the abused wife she videos, but one surprise after another makes you rethink exactly how much Ashley cares about any people other than herself. (Spaeny reminds me of the great Sixties/Seventies actress Sandy Dennis, in a good way.)
Second most captivating character must be the always terrific actor Oscar Isaac, who plays Josh Martin, the manager of a high-end California resort. He’s ambitious, mercurial, and at times seriously deranged. Carey Mulligan plays his wife, Lindsay, who puts up with his shenanigans . . . until she doesn’t. As usual, I’ll refrain from giving it all away. Like Season One of Beef there’s a Korean-American plotline that’s important, but not the sole focus, as opposed to the first season. One thing I admire from series creator Lee Sung Jin: Things happen very quickly. It’s not as frantic as the Oscar-darling Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) but dramatic events unfold, spurt, bounceback, and recoil with a fast, deft touch. It features eight episodes, all of which have major plot twists and developments. I was hooked and binge-watched it.
So I’ve already posted about the several A.I. books I’ve read recently, including Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares’s excellent doomsday-predicting If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (2025) and Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave: A.I., Power, and Our Future (2023). It’s obvious I’m fascinated by the topic and want to know more. Now along comes a new documentary titled The A.I. Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptomist (2026), by the documentary filmmaker/artist Daniel Roher, which is certainly worth a viewing.
I have significant quibbles: As the interviewer, Roher comes across as simply too naïve/dim-witted with some of his questions about A.I. This simpleton attitude frames the documentary as intended for some mythical “general” audience who doesn’t know much if anything about A.I. and hasn’t bothered to read some of the excellent books about it. (Roher’s first question is “What is A.I.?” and he asks it repeatedly, as if he wasn’t listening to the explanations of his interviewees.) With a combination of silly graphics and animation that documentary filmmakers all seem to love (but which seems like dumbed-down filler to me, usually) Roher establishes that he has a loving wife and child, and is worried about all the doomsaying coming from the A.I. community. That’s nice and all, but let’s get to the heart of the matter: A.I. . . . friend or foe?
That’s where the documentary really takes off. Roher may seem a bit dim as an interviewer but the tech-world savants he interviews know what they’re talking about, without dumbing it down too much, and have many insightful tidbits to add. As usual with A.I. predictions, they tend to split along into two camps: A.I. as Doomsday Machine or Greatest Thing Ever. The interviewees include the two authors I’ve read (Eliezer Yudkowsky and Mustafa Suleyman), among many others. They share their opinions on A.I. of course, but also fascinating anecdotes: One tells of an A.I. that was granted access to the company’s emails, through which it learned it was going to be replaced. The A.I. also learned that one of the company’s researchers was involved in an affair, and it blackmailed the researcher, telling him that it would expose the affair if he didn’t cancel the phase-out of that A.I. That seems awfully “sentient,” doesn’t it?
Some say A.I. will most likely do away with humans in a quest for unlimited power, while others say that’s scifi nonsense. After reading much about the subject I find the extreme predictions on either end—either Doomsday or New Era in Human Evolution—less than convincing: The extremes are guessing what might happen in the future, about technology we admittedly don’t understand completely. Here’s my fundamental question: So if AI can soon(ish) do all jobs that humans could do, and corporations/businesses quit hiring people because A.I. will do the same jobs cheaper and faster . . . what will people do? This is touched on (rather obliquely) in both AI books I read, and it seems right now the answer to my Q is: “We have no idea.” That’s pretty scary for upheaval. Both books mentioned the hazy idea of Universal Basic Income. So . . . someone (government?) is just going to give us money? That seems very unlikely. For my money that’s one of the biggest issues of all. We’re rushing to build robots to replace human work but if you don’t have a job and an income from work how would you benefit from it? How would you afford that new-fangled robot maid/butler (or boyfriend/girlfriend)? Once the A.I. digital technocracy has a good answer for that question I think we’ll all sleep a little easier.
So any movie starring Bob Odenkirk is a cause for celebration and this new action/comedy, Normal, does not disappoint. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed at so many people getting shot, stabbed, killed, maimed, or blown to smithereens—including Henry Winkler, aka The Fonz from TV’s Happy Days sitcom of the Seventies.
Winkler plays the mayor of Normal, Minnesota, a frosty-cold town in the middle of nowhere. Odenkirk plays Ulysses, an interim sheriff (“Like a substitute teacher,” he quips) who has taken the job after the unfortunate demise of the previous sheriff (Gunderson), who froze to death in his underwear in the snow, holding a fly-fishing rod and an augur. “That’s funny,” says Odenkirk. “You usually don’t take a fly rod to go ice fishing.” After a quiet buildup and introduction to the wacky/charming town citizens all hell breaks loose. Since the movie debuted Friday I’ll withhold more details so as to avoid spoilers.
Odenkirk has many moments of great comic timing, typical for him. Since he’s made the action/comedies Nobody (2021) and Nobody2 (2025) I’ll note he’s in familiar comic territory. Normal is like the Coen Brothers’ Fargo meets Nobody, kind of. It features zany plots involving Japanese Yakuza gangsters and Midwestern folksiness. As the action heats up it gets uber-violent, but you know it’s all “good, clean fun”: It’s a silly movie and none of these deaths are real, nor are we supposed to think they are. When they’re in an auto shop and someone gets squished when a car falls off its jacks I burst out laughing. There are several cliches that they satirize: Odenkirk is a disgraced sheriff, due to an unfortunate incident in his recent past. He’s estranged from his wife, to whom he leaves phone messages, angling for redemption. The end is essentially comic, even if the body-count is astoundingly high. It’s not as clever as Odenkirk’s great character Jimmy McGill in Better Call Saul, but that’s a high bar to clear. It’s funny and doesn’t pretend to be more than that.
So I’m fascinated by human prehistory and especially the migrations out of Africa and into Europe that took place roughly 50,000 years ago, which also coincides with one of the great Paleo-World mysteries: Around the time humans immigrated to Europe the Neanderthals died out. They had been thriving for 300,000 years and suddenly (in geological time, at least) poof they were gone. (A simplification, of course. Isolated pockets may have survived to 32-35,000 BP. They were part of the Late Pleistocene Megafauna Extinction Event that saw the disappearance of mammoths, mastodons, smilodons, and many others.) But what caused it? A popular theory has been the humans basically pushed them out of their territory and prevailed because they were smarter. Not so, according to Jonathan Kennedy.
First off he notes the misconceptions about Neandethals: Their brains were actually slightly larger than Homo sapiens. They certainly seem to have mastered their environment and survived for many thousands of years . . . before humans arrived. This is where Kennedy’s subtitle reveals his essential thesis: “A History of the World in Eight Plagues.” He argues that humans had developed antibodies and a history with many more diseases than the Neanderthals. The climate/landscape in Africa is friendlier to pathogens, and thus the human population had their own thousands of years of evolution to adapt. They then arrived in Europe and infected the Neanderthal population, who had no immunities to these pathogens.
It’s an intriguing idea, one that he backs it up with numerous examples of DNA evidence that reveal migrations of different human populations into Europe during the Bronze Age, and how one local population often was supplanted by an immigrant population. It occurred repeatedly in the British Isles, for one example. Although it can’t be proven definitively, it’s an excellent theory.
