Goose Shit Lake

A review of THE WILD GOOSE LAKE (2019)
Written and Directed by Diao Yinan
Cinematography by Dong Jingsong
Score by B6
Staring Hu Ge, Liao Fan, Gwei Lun-Mei, and Wan Qian

Some months back I ran into the trailer for The Wild Goose Lake and I was instantly taken in. I wanted to see this movie bad. It had everything I wanted in a movie: Crime, dirtbags on motorcycles, a beheading, a tiger, brutalism, and maybe violence-centered disco? Lots of ideas on offer, all of them intriguing to me. Unfortunately is not what I had hoped for. Having braved the rain and a pandemic, I can say that I have a candidate for my worst movie of the year. I can also comfortably say that this is the second worst thing to be involved with Wuhan province to come out this year.

The Wild Goose Lake is a threadbare neo-noir centered around a man who made a mistake in a fit of desperation and the people in his orbit and then. . . I don't know stuff happens and the plot concludes. It's a film that takes a long time to get nowhere. It's also a film where the motives of its characters don't seem to be murky as they are underdeveloped. You can't tell if its characters are concealing something or if there just isn't anything there. Of course if you have to ask yourself what the director is getting at, you probably have the answer. . .

Also, there's a sexual assault towards the end of the film. And it's bad. Not just because it's supposed to be bad, but because it doesn't add anything. It's just there. It's this shocking bit of sexual violence that doesn't add anything and doesn't seem to say anything other than look what I can film.

And fuck that.

Having just watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a film completely without the male gaze, it was shocking and deeply unpleasant to watch The Wild Goose Lake needlessly assert itself remind me that misogyny is live and well in the entertainment industry. (Of course the cast of Portrait of a Lady on Fire knows all about that. . . )

It was at this point in the film that one of my five fellow film goers walked out of the theater. Good for him.


That said there are moments of actual sublimity in the movie. They are as follows:

• After taking down a suspect, a troupe of plainclothes cops assemble around the perp. Each one of the cops is wearing shoes with lights on the bottom, like they're a bunch of overgrown mall rats. I can't tell if it's supposed to be funny, but like all of the good moments in this movie, it feels out of place.
• A man gets murdered with an umbrella. It's a really strange moment, because it feels like something out of a Takashi Miike movie. Up until this point, as many moments of stylization (and violence) as there are,  The Wild Goose Lake seems to take place on planet Earth, not in the world of Asian Extreme. Still, as jarring as the moment is, it was fun and ridiculous and made me wonder where this movie had been for the entire time.
•  The noodles at the end of the movie look really, really good.

The Wild Goose Lake is a humorless film without characters, and it lacks the panache to make up for its shortcomings. It's a frustrating movie to watch, because there clearly seems to be some sort of talent and perspective behind it-- just none of it ends up on the screen-- at least not in one piece.

Overall, these rare few moments have all of the joy of picking the good stuff out of a salad. Except that the salad is wilted and the dressing is terrible and you just wished that you had ordered something else.

James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and will see you next time, space cowboy. You can listen to him here and here. You can shovel piles of lucre at him here and here.

Good Astra

A review of AD ASTRA (2019)

Directed by James Gray
Written by James Gray and Ethan Gross
Cineamatography by Hoyte van Hoytema
Score by Max Richter and Lorne Balfe

Staring Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, Ruth Negga, and Liv Tyler

I wish that I had seen Ad Astra in the theaters, because it might be my favorite film of 2019 (just barely knocking out another Brad Pitt picture). I also wish that more people had seen it, because not only it is exactly my sort of film, it's the sort of daring genre picture that cinema needs more of. It's a beautiful, well-made, well-acted, and, well, rad as hell. Ad Astra is a classic adventure story masquerading as an arthouse film. It’s Treasure Island as much as it is 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

It ultimately is a transfixing meditation on the failures of masculinity, the limits of obsession, and what you do with your life when you realize how much of your life has been working towards a lie. It also has some of the raddest splashes of action that I’ve seen since the last Brad Pitt movie I saw.

This is all to say: As Astra is a film that is extremely my shit. It's a genre movie that's pulled off with the weight and seriousness that it deserves. It is as much a technical achievement as it is one of good, old-fashioned storytelling. As far as projects that are directly aimed at me, it’s nice when that happens and it actually turns out to be a good movie.

It's also nice to be able to recommend this sort of film. It's nice when I don't have to have caveats or say it with some level of embarrassment. It's just a good film and it's a good film that adheres to my weird set of interests.

Then again, considering size of certain other space-based adventure films, maybe I’m just hungry for something else.

Maybe.

One of the big reasons that I love Ad Astra is that I’m a sucker for the NASA aesthetic. The helmets, the rovers, the jetpacks, the rockets, the color scheme—even zero G toilets! Ad Astra uses all of the wonderful iconography of NASA, but then pushes it further into the future, filling the movie full of the raddest speculative articles from Popular Mechanics. But, beyond having an incredibly good-looking and well-realized art direction, Ad Astra weaves all of those visuals and all of those ideas into a broader picture. It introduces ideas and visuals that expand the story, rather than show it off. It’s a neat little trick and, again, it’s nice to see that big, thrilling science fiction films don’t have to sacrifice story for spectacle.

Beyond the solid supporting cast (hello to Ruth Negga), we have the man: Brad fucking Pitt.

Pitt, at his best, has always played slightly unhinged characters. Men with affectations who maybe aren’t 100% trustworthy and who have very specific physical traits (teeth or hair or no shirt, etc). In Ad Astra he plays very much against type. Roy McBride is a calm, collected, and man who had purposely isolated himself from the world and compartmentalized his emotions. He’s a great astronaut who, like his father, fails at being a good man. It’s a quiet role and it’s one that requires more than just charisma to get through it. It’s a

Pitt is fantastic in this movie. He takes what could have very well been a boring role or one that could have been saved with some histrionics and instead crafts a real human being worthy of empathy.

So, yeah, Brad Pitt is great.

It’s also a lot of fun to see one of America’s most important male icons take on a movie about failure and emotional development. It’s an interesting flip on what most adventure movies are about and it’s made more interesting by the fact that Brad Pitt isn’t just an actor, he’s Brad freaking Pitt. The same goes for Tommy Lee Jones, one of America’s foremost (space) cowboy grandpas, play his wayward father. Again, maybe it’s just me, but in 2020, I’d be hard-pressed to think of a more relevant message than “Watch this old man fail and ruin everything.”

Probably just me. . .

Ad Astra is a hell of a ride. While it does very specifically cater to my weird needs, it's still a spectacular-looking adventure story that manages to also be a powerful meditation on family, failure, and the future. Go check it out. I've said it before and I'll say it again, but this time I know it's true: Cinema needs more films like Ad Astra.

James Kislingbury is a writer, podcaster, and will see you next time, space cowboy. You can listen to him here and here. You can shovel piles of lucre at him here and here.