UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: Two Dandy Movies (‘Hoppers,’ ‘Project Hail Mary’), A Not-So-Dandy Movie (‘Crime 101’), And Some Dandy and Not So Dandy Television

Pixar Meets Frank Capra.

Hoppers (2026.  Screenplay by Jesse Andrews, story by Daniel Chong and Jesse Andrews, additional story contributions by Jordan Harrison and Faith Liu. 104 minutes)

Mabel, whom we first see as a kid, is a first cousin to Lilo of the and Stitch movies.  She’s a troublemaker.  We meet her as she is trying to kidnap and free a lot of animals in a science building at a university.  It is a brilliant slapstick sequence, beautifully designed and animated by the GAPS (the Geniuses at Pixar, for those of you who are latecomers to this column).  Buster Keaton would have been proud to call it his own.  Yes, it is that good.

Mabel’s only parental unit seems to be her Grandmother, whom she loves dearly.  We do too, since she is beautifully drawn and animated (GAPS again).  We are upset when she dies, but she comes back again and again.

Here I have to admit personal interest.  One of the reasons I wanted to see the film is that Grandmother is voiced by a former student of mine at Los Angeles City College, Karen Huie.  I have seen her in plays and on television. You can see her resume here.  I think this is her first Pixar film and her Facebook accounts suggest she was having a ball.  She is perfect casting and I am glad she comes back as a ghost.

Ah yes, the story.  Mabel is visiting the pond where she and Grandma used to hang out.  She discovers the animals have gone missing.  She uses a device in the science lab that will allow her intelligence to hop into the mind of an animal. (Do not worry about the scientific improbability; think “flux capacitor,” one of those all-purpose movie devices that allows you to do whatever needs to be done for plot purposes.)

So she ends up in the form of a beaver and connects with all the other animals.  You can check IMDb here to see the all-star cast doing voices.  What she discovers is that the Mayor of her town is trying to build a bridge over the pond and had to remove the animals to get to do it.

The mayor may remind you of the bad big shots in the later Frank Capra movies, like Edward Arnold in Capra’s You Can’t Take it With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and Meet John Doe (1941).  Arnold was very fat. The Mayor here is very thin and handsome and appropriately voiced by Jon Hamm in his Mad Men range. 

The writer who led Capra to his social commentary films was Robert Riskin.  Riskin wrote It Happened One Night (1934), which is mostly a pure romantic comedy.  Two years later Riskin added social comment in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and then wrote You Can’t Take it With You. Riskin had the balance as a writer to brilliantly combine comedy and social comment.

Pixar has mostly avoided social comment, with the exception of Wall-E (2008) and its environmental message.  In Hoppers  the social commentary is much stronger, which makes the film feel different from most Pixar films. Fortunately this set of GAPS manages the combination of character comedy and social commentary as well as Riskin and Capra did.  They did it so well that after a spectacular fire and dam-busting sequence leads the Mayor to change the path of his highway, I wondered about whom he was now building it over.

Only time will tell if other sets of GAPS will continue this development in Pixar films. Given that Hoppers has made a BIG pile of money, they probably will.

A big pile of money in MOVIE THEATRES.  So there Netflix.

A Trip to the Stars…and a Great Star Performance.

Project Hail Mary (2026. Screenplay by Drew Goddard, based on the novel by Andy Weir. 156 minutes)

My late wife was a scientist and I learned early not to take her to science fiction films.  A year after our daughter was born, the three of us went to see Fantastic Voyage (1966).  That’s the one where Raquel Welch and some other people are miniaturized and put in a very small submarine.  They are injected into the body of a man with medical problems.  The submarine works its way through his body to get to the brain.  Thank goodness we were at a drive-in so the audience around us could not hear my wife saying things like, “That’s not the right color,” “That organ is not the right texture,” or “You can’t get there from there.”

Many years later, after the good reviews of The Martian (2015) which emphasized the scientific accuracy of the film, she decided she wanted to see it.  So we went and she loved it.  You can read my review of it here.

The Martian was based on a novel by Andy Weir and the screenplay was written by Drew Goddard.  So here they are again, and the results are just as good or maybe better.  The film opens with some shots of zippers.  For a minute I thought I’d wandered into a theatre showing a porno film, but thank goodness no, since I was more in the mood for outer rather than inner space. The film starts with Ryland Grace, realizing he is the only survivor of a mission into deep, deep space. He seems to have amnesia and we learn stuff as he learns stuff, smart writing.

Eventually we learn that the mission is to the one star in the universe that is not being eaten alive by a bug of some kind.  Well, it made sense to me at the time, and I am sure if my wife was still alive, you could have explained it to me. Anyway, the mission is to get the stuff that is keeping the other star alive and bring is back to earth so we can save our sun.  And now Grace, who has only been a high school science teacher (but who once wrote a thesis about this issue that nobody believed), has be a pilot and technician and everything else.

One of the things Weir and Goddard did in The Martian is give Matt Damon’s character, who is trapped on Mars, a sense of humor.  It paid off in that film, and it really pays off in this film.  The lead here is Ryan Gosling and he gives one of the greatest star performances I have ever seen. I assume a lot of that is in the script, but a lot of it is Gosling’s reactions to what is going on.  He can shift from sly to serious to silly to a lot of other things.  Justin Chang, the film critic for The New Yorker, thinks that performance is uneven, but I think that is what makes in interesting.  And boy does it hold our attention.

For a while at least.  One of the problems I had with The Martian was that it went on way too long.  That’s problem here.  Late in the picture we get a couple of flashbacks as to how Grace ended up being on the trip.  These scenes seem to be written to play earlier in the film, since they are telling us stuff we already know by two hours into the film.  I suspect they may have been intended for earlier and then edited in later to help the first part move quicker, but by the time we get them in the movie, we don’t need them.

There are also three or four or more climaxes that could have been speeded up. You don’t want your film to drag as it gets near the end.  We the audience have been sitting there for a long time, and we are ready for the movie to end.

 A Low-temperature Heat.

Crime 101 (2026. Screenplay at Bart Layton, based on the novella by Don Winslow. 140 minutes)

Heist movies used to be reasonable length.  The Asphalt Jungle (1950) was 112 minutes. The Killing (1956) was 83 minutes.  But Heat (1995) stretched it out to 170 minutes.  Michael Mann, the writer of Heat, based that script on the script he wrote for the 1989, 97 minute television movie, L.A. Takedown.  That’s what happens when writers become successful directors: their movies get longer.

Crime 101 is about a jewel thief, Davis, who feels mistreated by his boss, Money, and decides to work for himself.  Davis is being tracked by a cop, Lou, who notices the pattern of Davis’s jobs: they are all along the 101 freeway in Los Angeles.  Meanwhile, there is an insurance investigator, Sharon, who leaves her job because she is not getting promoted. 

The early scenes establishing all these characters are not as well written as they ought to be.  They are rather flat and do not give the actors (Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, and Halle Berry as the three characters above, respectfully) much to do.  Those scenes drag.  Once the action picks up in the second half, the dialogue and acting improve, because the characters are talking about things that matter to them, so there are subtexts (the emotions underneath the dialogue) for the actors to play.

Bart Layton, who also directs, lets the whole picture drag.  He includes a lot of long takes of overhead views of cars in LA.  The great TV show The Rookie has similar shots as scene transitions, but they are short and to the point.  If Layton and his editor had cut the car shots down, he could have gotten the film down to a flat two hours and it would have been better for it.  There is at least one great car/motorcycle chase.

On the other hand, while the actors are good solid actors, they are not the all-star cast Mann put together for Heat.

Some Spring 2026 Television.

Let’s follow Roberts Rule of Order and take care of some old or at least ongoing business first.

A few columns ago I wrote an item on 9-1-1 Nashville that you can read here. I was disappointed in the show for a couple of reasons.  The balance was off between the professional (firefighting, general life saving) and personal (Don, the head of the station, reconnects with a son he had by a girl friend and has him training to be a firefighter, much to the irritation of his current wife and their son, who also works at the station). 

As the season has progressed the writers have improved the balance.  We spend more time with the professional activities, but the personal stuff raises its ugly head just enough times to be interesting.

The second problem was that Chris O’Donnell did not have the gravitas that he needed as the head of the station.  O’Donnell had played a team player on his previous show, NCIS: Los Angeles, and he was good at it.  As Nashville has proceeded, he has gained that gravitas.

Elsbeth is in the same situation it has had from the beginning.  When they have a great guest killer, the show clicks.  When they don’t, it doesn’t.  One of the best episodes this season was “Otherwise Enraged,” with the great Beanie Feldstein as Rachel, a woman who loves planning parties and assumes people love her.  When she finds out one of her “friends” has sent messages telling their friends not to show up at one of Rachel’s parties, she kills her.  Feldstein gives a powerhouse performance that provides great chemistry between Feldstein and Carrie Preston as Elsbeth.

Matlock has been dragging a bit.  The setup at the beginning of the series is that a woman pretending to be Matty Matlock has joined a New York law firm to find incriminating evidence that somebody at the law firm had helped a pharmaceutical company release a dangerous drug that had killed Matty’s daughter.  We have been following Matty in her search for two years now and it is getting tiresome.  The April 23 two hour season finale finally brought the case to a head, but before then there was a lot of discussion, particularly between Matty and Olympia, about how they are coming to the end of the case and what they are going to do next.  It sounds what the writers were talking about in the writers’ room.  There is back and forth as to whether the two women get the people involved arrested.  They finally do and we will have to wait until next season to see what happens.

The problem now is that while we have had individual cases, we have had very few continuing storylines and characters that the show will need to have after they get the evidence.  On the other hand, we will still have Kathy Bates and the rest of the cast who are not in jail.

NCIS the mothership celebrated its 500^th episode.  Yeah, hurrah, etc.!  And they celebrated by… killing off one of its most important secondary characters, Director Leon Vance, played beautifully for 396 episodes by Rocky Carroll.  Fans have been furious.  According to at least one account, so has Carroll.  But Carroll has directed at least one episode after Vance’s death.  Maybe the NCIS investigators should find out what that is all about.

OK, now for some newbies.

Marshals is the 1,435th spinoff from Yellowstone.  It is not created or written by Taylor Sheridan, but based on characters created by him for Yellowstone.  The creator for Marshals is Spencer Hudnut, whose previous credits include being both writer and producer of the series Seal Team (2017-2024). So you can see how he got the job on Marshals; Kayce Dutton was already established as an ex-Navy Seal in Yellowstone.

Kayce is the youngest son of John Dutton.  He was married to a Native American woman, Monica, but for some reason the writers have had die before Marshals starts.  She was played by Kelsey Asbille and I am going to miss Monica, since she gave a little warmth to Kayce, who always seemed to be moping around as the youngest Dutton son.

In Marshals Kayce is talked into joining the local federal marshals unit run by his ex-Navy Seal friend, Pete.  They chase bad guys.  There is a lot of gorgeous scenery, and it is nice to see chases with guys on horses instead of cars in Los Angeles.  

The supporting cast as members of the marshals team is good, but the problem is Luke Grimes as Kayce.   Like Chris O’Donnell in the early episodes of 9-1-1 Nashville, he is still in a supporting actor mode.  The writers need to give him something more to do that just sulk.

CIA is a new CBS mystery with a whole pile of creators, never a good sign.  The ones you will be familiar with are Dick Wolf, the God of the Law & Order kingdom, and Warren Leight, a veteran of the Law & Order world, particularly Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

You can see the L&O influence.  The team of a CIA agent and an FBI agent are constantly chasing crooks, spies, terrorists and whatever around very New York City locations.  The problem is that the show is not very smart about how both the CIA and the FBI work.  Yes, the FBI folks chase crooks, but the CIA folks are mostly investigating, looking at documents and other evidence.  I will grant you that since 9-11 the two organizations, which for decades hated each other, now work together more than they used to. (Brief history lesson: when the CIA was being formed in the late forties, J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, wanted to be the head of it too.  The government knew that was giving too much power to one rather ruthless person.  Hoover never forgave the slight.)

The other problem with CIA is that there is very little chemistry between the two leads. Tom Ellis, who plays the CIA agent Glass, is a compelling presence.  Nick Gehlfuss, playing the FBI guy Goodman, is not very expressive.  They do not make a watchable team.

Rooster is a new HBO comedy. It stars Steve Carell and was created by Bill Lawrence (Ted Lasso) and Matt Tarses (wrote for and was co-executive producer on the original [2001-2004] Scrubs).  So these guys are not amateurs.

But the show simply never quite works.

Carell is an author of mystery novels who is not completely over his divorce.  His adult daughter, a teacher at a college, has learned that not only has her husband been unfaithful, he has gotten his girlfriend pregnant.  (I think it is more than about time to drop storylines about professor sleeping with their students.  It does not happen as often as television and the movies think it does.  Most of us professors are smart enough not to get involved in that sort of thing.)

Carell’s Greg comes to the college to support his daughter Katie. He ends up teaching a course.

Most of the attempts at humor you have seen before in a lot of college movies.  There is nothing fresh here, and most of the humor simply falls flat.

RJ Decker, new on ABC and Hulu, is a private eye series, very much influenced by The Rockford Files (1974-1980).  Like Rockford, Decker is an ex-con who is now a private eye and lives in a trailer.  Decker’s is in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, rather than on the beach at Malibu, California.

Decker is created by Robert Doherty, and is listed as “inspired by the novel Double Whammy by Carl Hiaasen.”  Thank goodness we get a lot of Hiassen’s sense of humor, beautifully delivered by Scott Speedman, late of Felicity (1998-2002).  Very late, since he is no longer the pretty boy he was then, but a rugged, unshaven guy in Hawaiian shirts, and funny.  The supporting cast is good from the get-go.  See for yourself.