James Gray's "inward-looking" sci-fi film AD ASTRA starring Brad Pitt

I'm there for whatever Gray makes.

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6567-james-gray-s-ad-astra

yeah I am excited about this

Gray is one of my favorite journeyman directors. Didn't this get delayed a lot? From what little they give away in the trailers it seems to have some Interstellar vibes.

how do you define "journeyman"?

I have my screening next week.

I mean that every one of his films is very different from the one before it, like a classic studio system director.

Like here, which I just found:

http://collider.com/journeyman-directors-explained/

he's not a 'journeyman' to me; not even in the auteurist Allan Dwan sense

I read "journeyman" and think, I dunno, Henry Hathaway or something

more like Jack Smight

p sure the guy who wrote the Collider thing has not seen any pre-Jaws movies

every one of his films is very different from the one before it, like a classic studio system director.

the difference is I believe Gray originates all his projects. Also a lot of commonalities in the ones before (or even through) The Immigrant.

Yeah, I guess that's a distinction. No one is bringing him projects.

Like, Curtis Hanson, that's the type of director I'm thinking of.

ughhh

I like Hanson.

It’s very interesting, because they have found that it’s a very different thing for the astronauts that go up 200 miles up in the ISS, where the Earth is still most of your vision when you look out the window.... And it’s a very different psychological effect, apparently. They don’t know for sure what would happen the further you go out, but they’re anticipating that it has potentially serious consequences. When the Earth is just a blue dot, what does that mean?

So, this certainly went into the kind of thought process that Brad and I had discussed about the character. It became very important to us, this idea that the Earth all of a sudden gets smaller and smaller, and the sun gets smaller and smaller. All the things that we know—all the things that are tangible and beautiful—seem further and further away. We thought this was an excellent context for something....

You know, I have huge admiration for Alfonso Cuarón, because I don’t know how he made that movie Gravity, knowing now what it is. What we tried to do, as much as we could, was go old school. We built two sets; a horizontal set, and then a vertical one. On the horizontal set, you would put the actor on a moving rig. And then the vertical, you’re shooting from the bottom looking up, and you hang the actor on wires. Usually, they’re blocking the wires. When they’re not, you paint them out. It’s a very effective effect when you combine the two sets, and the wides and the close-ups....

It’s basically like making a kind of semi 3D painting. You have pre- and post-vis, but it doesn’t really approximate what the thing is going to look like, and you have to get it right. If you make a mistake in judging the animation, they turn to you and they say, “What are you talking about? That’s rendered. You did that with the animation you chose.” So, I realize I really have to be so specific about the animation on a very basic level. And that was painstaking. That took forever.

https://deadline.com/2019/08/ad-astra-james-gray-interview-sci-fi-future-fox-venice-1202705879/

also

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/16/james-grays-journey-from-the-outer-boroughs-to-outer-space

“There’s a level of bullshit that the culture is now embracing,” Gray said. “The other day, the doctor is poking around my pancreas, and he’s, like, ‘You see “The Avengers 2”?’ I’m, like, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Why not?’ I’m, like, ‘I’m not nine!’ ” Gray thought that public reporting of movies’ gross profits, a practice that took off in the eighties, changed the popular conception of what a successful film looked like. (“My dad will say, ‘That was a very big hit!’ I’ll be, like, ‘I don’t think you’re a stockholder in Time Warner!’ ”)

uh oh he's flirting with getting an old man gif ILX'd at him

I’m, like, ‘I’m not nine!’

lol these movies aren't for 9yos, they're for manbabies

“They rate everything according to Francis Ford Coppola movies,” Ali Gray explained. A superb meal on Gross’s scale is a “Godfather.” A meal better than superb is a “Godfather II.” One that’s rewarding but an acquired taste (such as Gray’s lemon fettuccine with jalapeños) is an “Apocalypse Now.” Once, there was a “Jack” meal, but they don’t talk about it.

Fuck this dude; he can fall under a bus.

I'm seeing this on thursday :) Quite excited, and I'm not really the biggest Gray-fan anyway.

I'm a fan (less so of Brad Pitt), and I'll be there Thursday.

I've seen two, maybe three of his movies (Little Odessa, We Own The Night, and I might have seen The Immigrant, I don't remember). Zero interest in the others, this one included.

Two Lovers and Lost City of Z flirt with greatness often.

haven't seen his other films but I liked The Lost City of Z

We Own the Night is such a weird clunky obvious movie that I feel it's almost a commentary on something. I thought it looked great but felt very stupid.

Oh, I'm seeing this thing! But had to bail on that New Yorker profile 1/3 of the way in. Excruciating, and not because Gray himself is a ludicrous human being.

I even liked large bits of We Own the Night. He has a gravity that never turns to camp.

the weirdness of WOtN is in its total sincerity in presenting absurd material, which isn't necessarily a demerit...

now u know how I feel about u, unp

Tommy Lee Jones is plying Pitt's father here... he is a mere 17 years younger than Brad

Wow how does that work

lol

relativity.

Love all this guy's movies and I'm really excited about this.

otm

i'm starting to really hate every fucking thread in this fucking middle-aged asylum

Saw it this afternoon and I was sadly unimpressed. Brad Pitt's ok and there's some decent space spectacle and a few dark laughs, but it's portentous in the extreme (thankfully dialogue is relatively scant, but I thought both it and Pitt's voiceover border on cringe- and/or laugh-worthy at times) and the whole thing is so utterly unsurprising/unadventurous, in terms of ideas, plot or the emotional side of things. I liked both Gravity and Sunshine, and thought this bears a lot of similarities to and/or took cues from both, without really doing anything different enough for me. Not terrible, but not great either.

Press reviews I've read have been incredibly positive though (Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian and the Skinny and List here in Scotland), so I was surprised and disappointed. Anyone else caught it yet?

I watched it, loved it. Loved the way it just dives headfirst into banality.

TLJ has some beautiful line readings.

I enjoyed it more than the average metaphysical space film, but this is not my genre.

Ah, I wish I had loved it! I'm generally a fan of this kind of film and could have done with a couple of hours proper escape.

How do you mean you loved the dive into banality?

reported reshoots by another director

https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2019/9/ad-astra-had-reshoots-without-james-grays-approval

yikes

i would imagine Gray would not mesh perfectly with big-budget expectations

I liked this a lot and look forward to seeing it again, but a lot like Z it felt relatively muted to me on first watch. Just like Z I found myself wanting it to go just a bit further *out there* (funny thing to think during a movie that ends literally at Neptune). The music was good but nothing quite as effective as the Ravel in Z.

Perhaps unfair to compare them since I feel so strongly about the prior film, but I think I actually enjoyed this more than Z after the first watch. I will see this again with my aging father (lol) who is a sci fi nut and hopefully untangle my feelings a bit more.

It’s always upsetting to me when movies like this—ambitiously flawed thoughtful and personal, lyrical, adult—are handled poorly and then bomb—which this will. Every great movie is a miracle but it feels like we could have movies like this pretty regularly.

Also: no idea why 2001 is being metioned with this...the real comparison is Soderbergh’s Solaris.

I enjoyed this, wasn't totally blown away by it. It's too facile to say "Terence Malick's Apocalypse Now," but I can't shake the phrase. The moon chase and space critters were weird side roads to take, and Natasha Lyonne's cameo was a lol.

There was a shitload of Movie Science in this picture.

it sounds interesting, hearing about it makes me think of High Life, but I guess this has more action

Just saw. Really enjoyed this, need to think about it. Kinda wanna see it again.

It's interesting to reflect on the fact that the reserved emotional nature of these last two films is both text and subtext...both are about men with an inability to have intimacy, inhabiting movies that keep us at arm's length (Ad Astra *talks about* feelings, but only in the negative)...but what's particularly intriguing to me is that they see masculinity itself as a kind of woundedness, or a way to cope with being wounded, a survival strategy or search for security that's enormously empathetic and not really interested in scoring cheap shots against "toxic masculinity" so much as it is concerned about charting a way through masculinity towards something...more yielding.

The story of how Natasha Lyonne ended up in this movie is so very... Natasha Lyonne: https://slate.com/culture/2019/09/natasha-lyonne-ad-astra-cameo-explained-james-gray.html

I love her.

Those were space monkeys; I am willing to stake my reputation on it.

It’s very rare that I do an immediate rewatch of any film; I could see trying this again if it were in theaters in maybe, oh, five years.

last year's Tarantino movie is 10x better than this was, jesus.

akm otm

i'll assume youre wrong

I'll take a self-indulgent/butchered by the studios mess by a good director over anything fucking Tootsie Tarantino does 4eva!

Kinda got overlooked I like this movie quite a bit for what it was, Hollywood outer space pop psych... Sound design was fantastic.

Finally got around to this - a bit ponderous but ultimately solid. Of the nu-ratpack space movies was definitely the best or, at least, the one with the most ideas and best visual + sound design.

yeah i liked this a lot more than i expected to

seemed to draw from various New Wave sf deconstructions of the space program - Moorcock's Black Corridor, various Malzberg books (Beyond Apollo, etc.), but I think Morbz is also correct about the debt to Westerns

just saw this, it was phenomenally stupid. I liked the way it paid the smallest attention to some aspects of physics but completely fucked up almost everything else. Praise for being one of the rare vacuum-is-silent brigade, though.
Voiceover was terrible and ponderous. Pitt's line deliveries also often unintentionally funny.
Also like the way when they meet the space baboon they don't even bother looking for the people presumably also on the space station (unless baboon sent the SOS itself because it was bored).
What the fuck did Tommy Lee Jones eat all those years? His station was tiny.

yes, worst movie I saw last year by some distance.

nice to read wrongness

It looked nice and I think there’s a seed of a good movie there, but yeah, it is not great. B-rate Malick voiceovers maybe a big part of what dropped it.

Gray >> Malick this decade

indubitably

I want a panel show with Morbs and Alfred now

pay us!

He and I meet in Manhattan twice a year.

lol

I'm behind on 2019 films, but I've put this at the top of my cue

the Morbs-Lord Sotosyn doc?

I'd make all my film-loving (hating?) friends throw a pittance at a patreon

I've got a dozen or so

He and I meet in Manhattan twice a year.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, January 29, 2020 8:21 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'd buy tickets to this

I am going to choose to read that as a tryst

no, my hair isn't good enough for him

I mean, I know the fans here want this to be something with fucking, but I just want pure snark. Which is dirtier tbh

ad astra - visually stunning, some great scenes, some of the most heavy-handed "meaningfulness" i've ever seen in a movie (e.g. when brad and his dad are clinging to each other in space at the end and tommy lee jones says "you have to let me go" and a big blinking neon subtitle comes up that says HE DOESN'T JUST MEAN PHYSICALLY LET HIM GO HE ALSO MEANS EMOTIONALLY as tommy lee jones winks at the camera), overall pretty dumb and a step down from lost city of z

(e.g. when brad and his dad are clinging to each other in space at the end and tommy lee jones says "you have to let me go" and a big blinking neon subtitle comes up that says HE DOESN'T JUST MEAN PHYSICALLY LET HIM GO HE ALSO MEANS EMOTIONALLY as tommy lee jones winks at the camera)

lol yes, this gave me a severe pain

lol @ neon subtitle

I am not afraid to admit that I enjoy a movie where there is SPACEYELLING at SPACEDAD

also SPACE APES

and of course SPACE MADNESS

ad astra - visually stunning, some great scenes, some of the most heavy-handed "meaningfulness" i've ever seen in a movie (e.g. when brad and his dad are clinging to each other in space at the end and tommy lee jones says "you have to let me go" and a big blinking neon subtitle comes up that says HE DOESN'T JUST MEAN PHYSICALLY LET HIM GO HE ALSO MEANS EMOTIONALLY as tommy lee jones winks at the camera), overall pretty dumb and a step down from lost city of z

― na (NA), Thursday, January 30, 2020 8:52 AM (thirty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is basically otm, even though i am generally pretty lenient when it comes to visually stunning space movies

maybe i should see lost city of z??

yes you should

yes!!

thirded

n/a's right, and Ad Astra is certainly his weakest film, but the visual and sound design and Pitt and the staging of the violence more than compensanted.

I didn’t hate it. It’s no Silent Running, though.

What is?

Could’ve also gone for scratching the AstroKurtz crap and just enjoying a lunar Mad Max movie.

more Pop-timist

for Doug Trumbull + Pitt ya got Tree of Life

cynical me is getting much better at watching stuff uncynically and I really liked this as a result

Beautiful but ponderous. The narration is at least as bad as the much-loathed Blade Runner voiceover.

It's not that this film was so monumentally dumb (and as a sci-fi it is staggeringly, relentlessly stupid), it's that it was ever touted as anything else. Looks great, though, and I'll watch any daft shit if it's set in space. I think it might become a camp classic.

I want a panel show with Morbs and Alfred now

― babu frik fan account (mh), Wednesday, January 29, 2020 10:20 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

pay us!

― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius),

I wish I had!

I remember literally nothing about this aside from the rover chase.

how did no one make the horrible Dad Astra pun

p sure i made it irl

The rover chase was cool but had me questioniong the viability of moon piracy as a business model. Also Donald Sutherland was there but also not there which was odd.

finally watched it, there are some great sequences but also several wtf moments some of which have been mentioned already:

- so he accidentally kills the crew that in theory could've done what he's done? "sorry guys but i really need to see my dad"

- the message had to be recorded in an anechoic chamber because why? ("well, neptune is very very far, we really want the sound quality to be the best, you know")

- natasha lyonne looked so out of place that i'm hoping she's intentionally planting herself in different movies and it will somehow come together in russian doll season 3

i don't remember one second of this film I was so looking forward to and found so disappointing