#95: The Clooneyfication of Ryan Gosling is complete

And other thoughts on Project Hail Mary, which I bravely did not like

Death by Consumption

3/24/26 - 3/30/26

The apocalypse has never been more in the air than over the past week, and no one knows what to do about it. Our president is too busy interior decorating to care about the war he started, everyone’s telling me to stock up on beans and rice before oil hits $500/barrel or whatever, and now I have to deal with the fact that Kristi Noem’s husband is a cross dresser? It’s bleak when the only genuinely “good” news I’ve seen all week is that TMZ is turning their sociopathic attention away from terrorizing former child stars and towards harassing politicians. This could genuinely be major for us — they’ve already got Lindsey Graham pretending to be on a manly hunting trip while he’s actually prancing around Disney World with a bubble wand. We’ve regressed as a society in a thousand different ways, but a little retro homophobic bullying is a-okay in my book when it’s directed at these ghouls. Harvey Levin… welcome to the resistance.

This week: I am here to ruin everyone’s fun with Ryan Gosling’s new beloved blockbuster, I watched yet another Gwyneth film, I enjoyed reading about what the news industry was like before our country completely fell apart, and I have crunched the numbers and decided that everyone involved in the Iran War is a fucking idiot.

Project Hail Mary (2026) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park

For a select few actors (almost always male), it’s possible to reach a point in your career and fame where you no longer have to act. Sure, they might be technically acting in front of a camera, starring in a 2-hour feature film, and they might be doing actor-y things like driving a spaceship or a car, or yelling, or crying, or looking pensively out a window, but none of it is actually acting. Instead, these men simply act as themselves, while doing the things their character does.

Harrison Ford was the pioneer in this arena — sometimes he’s Harrison Ford with a space blaster, sometimes he’s Harrison Ford with a whip — but there are many actors who fit the bill. Brad Pitt is always playing Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise is always playing Tom Cruise (and, actually, I do believe he’s jumping out of planes off-camera), and I’m willing to bet Matt Damon’s character in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey will just turn out to be Matt Damon, but in a Greek-ish helmet.But for me, the platonic ideal of non-acting actors will always be George Clooney. Quick: name one role of his that’s different from any others! Danny Ocean is Michael Clayton is Jay Kelly (I haven’t even seen Jay Kelly but I know I’m right). It all makes you wonder: why does Leonardo DiCaprio still try so hard? He doesn’t need to be doing all that, it turns out! And yet, for as little effort as some of these guys put into their work, we (me included!) still eat it up, because these men are charming and handsome and grade-A movie stars, and it’s always fun to watch movie stars do things handsomely and charmingly.

For many years, Ryan Gosling wasn’t one of these guys. He was a genuine actor who put in some serious work: he played a Jewish neo-Nazi in The Believer, he was believably old-timey in The Notebook, he was convincingly in love with a sex doll in Lars and the Real Girl, etc.. He had — and still has — the talent! But around 10 years ago, he stopped disappearing into roles and started just being Ryan Gosling. Sure, there are different shades to the characters he’s chosen over the last decade — Blade Runner 2049 is sad Ryan Gosling, Barbie is dumb Ryan Gosling — but it’s all still, essentially, Ryan Gosling. (Sometimes he has an accent.) And with Project Hail Mary, he’s thrown in the towel and gone full Clooney: it’s Ryan Gosling, in space!

Project Hail Mary bravely asks: what if an astronaut was handsome?

As a film, Project Hail Mary is fine. It’s fine! It’s beautifully shot — one of the most impressively crafted space films we’ve had in a long, long time, in fact! But the tone of it… oh boy. The movie’s attempts at humor (and it’s attempting to be more of a comedy than any other genre, unfortunately) were cloying and rather desperate, full of Marvel-esque quips that practically required Ryan Gosling to smirk at the camera after each line (in fact, he pretty much does smirk at the camera a few times).

I know that this sort of stuff is what passes for most comedy these days, and that most big-budget movies are essentially live-action Pixar films now, but I found watching this movie in a theater a baffling experience. I genuinely did not even smile at a single joke! To give you a sample: one joke is that the alien in the film (sorry if this is a spoiler, but the alien was 95% of the trailer) misinterprets the phrase “fist bump” as “fist my bump”……..which is then deemed so funny that we have to call back to it every 20 minutes, for the rest of the film…………………..are you laughing yet? When you start seeing “fist my bump” merch sported by all the Disney adults in your life, this is where it came from.

There could have been a good movie buried in here, but unfortunately it’s a 2.5-hour mess. Wild tonal swings, lame humor, a completely unnecessary third-act twist that’s discarded the instant it’s revealed… what the hell was going on?! And yet, I know I’m in the minority: the movie is getting rave reviews, it’s about to make a zillion dollars, and my Monday night showing was packed. But watching this corny film surrounded by an enormous audience absolutely howling with laughter, I walked out wondering… am I the alien?

Two Lovers (2008) — on Criterion

The alien in Project Hail Mary has nothing on Gwyneth Paltrow and Joaquin Phoenix, two deeply strange creatures pretending to be everyday people falling in love in Two Lovers, possibly one of the last truly great Gwyneth films we’ve ever gotten. These are two of our weirdest, least-normal actors, and that gives this already tonally-strange film an interesting layer: are these characters meant to be this odd, or is that just Gwyneth and Joaquin? This film has such a uniquely bleak-but-still-charming perspective on everything from modern dating to living with your parents. It’s also an immediate all-time New York City film for me: a 34-year-old Joaquin Phoenix yelling, “We’re out of seltzer!” to the parents he lives with in Brighton Beach is simply one of the most Jewish moments ever captured on film.

The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture, by Tricia Romano (2024) — paperback

This massive oral history of the Village Voice felt like eavesdropping on a bunch of retired drunks reminiscing about the good old days (this is a compliment). It’s extremely insidery — people frequently talk about “Ellen” or “Karen” or “Bob” as if the editors from an indie newspaper in the 1970s are Cher or Madonna — but once I gave up trying to keep track of the cast of characters (there’s a 6-page list of everyone in the beginning of the book, if you really need to follow), I had a great time getting all the delicious, decades-old gossip!

From its birth in the 50s to its death in the 2010s (it came back in 2020 but it’s really not the same), the Village Voice was literally there for everything, so while the book is ostensibly the history of a newspaper, it’s pretty much a history of our own country. Decades before Pride and #MeToo and BLM, the paper was actively fighting with itself (in public!) about gays and women and Black people in the workplace and in culture, and it’s both refreshing and depressing to see that none of the fights we’re having now are new. Between all the history, you get strange little tidbits that you could only get from a paper that was at the center of culture during the periods when American culture changed so quickly (one weird example: James Earl Jones was a janitor there???). But, as always, all this history leads us quite depressingly to modern times, when the internet sweeps in and destroys pretty much every industry, and then Donald Trump shows up to finish our country off. But until we get to the hell we’re all trapped in now, it was a fun, wild ride!

“Miscellanea: The War in Iran” by Bret Devereaux — at A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

I don’t know why I keep reading and listening to stuff about Trump’s Iran War, because there are no answers to be found, no deeper reasonings or learnings or game plans to uncover. This is the dumbest fucking thing a president has done in a long, long time, and now literally everyone on the planet will have to suffer for it in some way. But if you were looking for a long read that coherently explains exactly why this war is so fucking dumb, this blog does a decent job at it.

The result is a fairly classic escalation trap: once the conflict starts, it is extremely costly for either side to ever back down, which ensures that the conflict continues long past it being in the interests of either party. Every day this war goes on make both the United States and Iran weaker, poorer and less secure but it is very hard for either side to back down because there are huge costs connected to being the party that backs down. So both sides ‘escalate to de-escalate’ (this phrase is generally as foolish as it sounds), intensifying the conflict in an effort to hit hard enough to force the other guy to blink first. But since neither party can back down unilaterally and survive politically, there’s practically no amount of pain that can force them to do so.

(One petty complaint is that whoever writes this blog needs to chill on the bolds and italics. The formatting throughout this entire post is insane! I love writing with emphasis as much as any other aging Millennial, but why is this blog yelling at me while I read???)

It’s too staggering, really, to sit with the concept that thousands, if not millions, of people could die (and, in many cases, are already dying) simply because some of the dumbest and most soulless people alive managed to gain control of the US, Israel, and Iran, but we do have to face it. Even if this isn’t exactly World War III yet, it kind of is, and it’s all a lot more evil and stupid than anyone could have imagined.