Interstellar

An interdimensional disappointment.

There are just some directors who shouldn’t attempt to do the mushy stuff. Play to your strengths, rather than make a half-baked story about parental responsibility, loss, and the enduring power of love. Christopher Nolan makes cold films, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, considering his filmography contains multiple movies that rightfully deserved to be called masterpieces. But his films are not good at being sentimental, or expressing emotions beyond jealousy, ambition, or dogged perseverance. Any time Nolan’s films have attempted a romantic subplot, they’re always the most criticized and forgettable parts of his films (looking at you Scarlett Johansson in The Prestige, and Katie Holmes/Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Dark Knight trilogy). Sure, the guy can create movies about pining for a lost love (Inception, Memento), but if that love is still alive – fuhgeddaboutit. Interstellar handles the complex themes of family, love, and the “fifth dimension” through clunky, awkward dialogue that’s on par with some of the crap George Lucas wrote for Star Wars Episode Two: Attack of the Clones. This movie is hugely disappointing.

Earth is going through a transition period – humans can only grow corn. At least, I think that’s what was going on. It’s all very confusing, because characters still drink beer, the water system still seems to be functioning, and kids still have to take science classes in school. It really doesn’t seem all that bad. Meanwhile dust storms are commonplace, and archival footage of the folks who lived through these terrible times reminiscing are interspersed throughout the first quarter of the film, and then that faux documentary trope is all but forgotten to move into the outer reaches of space.

But anyhow, Matthew McConaughey ekes out his existence as a farmer (of corn) with two kids – the dull son and the precocious daughter – whilst living with his grizzled father-in-law who moonlights as the kids’ grizzled babysitter. The daughter thinks a ghost lives in her room, and some spoookky occurrences gets Dad to start believing in the supernatural force too. Yada yada yada, ghost leads McConaughey to hidden scientific outpost and off on a rollicking space adventure, minus the rollicking part and heavy on the scenes talking about wormholes, relativity, and the quantum mechanics of love (not joking). There’s also supposed to be some poignancy about leaving your family behind to do something IMPORTANT and how you sacrifice making memories with your kids because you’re doing IMPORTANT things. Yes, the film is romanticizing a world where “work-life balance” is severely tilted to the work side of things.

The biggest problem I have with the film is the motivations of every single character don’t make sense.

1. McConaughey

McConaughey’s character is the dad who has to leave his kids behind to “save the world” but is tortured by the anguish that he won’t get to see them grow up. But he doesn’t have to leave. This is the future, where robots exist, and despite McConaughey being the “best damn pilot NASA has ever seen and the only one who can captain this ship” in the film’s climatic piloting scene McConaughey asks the robot to fly the ship for him to make a difficult manoeuvre. Half of the adventure is spent on auto-pilot while the human passengers slumber peacefully in cryo-sleep. Yet McConaughey is such an integral part of the mission because he can fly so good. Ugh.

Also, he’s supposed to love his children so much, but about half-way through the movie he forgets he has a son. Just watch. There’s a point where he’s crying because both of his children are growing up in front of his eyes, and then later, he’s just concerned about his daughter. I don’t know, I just find it a little difficult to empathize with a character when he doesn’t even really care about his kids.

2. Unnamed Celebrity Cameo

Yep, a Hollywood star pops up later in the film. He has a plan that makes absolutely no sense when you take the three seconds to think about it. Let’s just say he tells a fib, and then when he could own up to that fib, he decides to make it 1000x worse, and I still can’t understand what his endgame was. Please explain if you know.

3. Everyone else

This is getting long-winded, so every character has an issue. The first “Red Shirt” character stands beside a door that leads to safety. Instead of walking through the door himself, he watches for several minutes as another character is carried through the door after travelling a mile away. The stupidity of the character overshadows any of the pathos of his death.

Jessica Chastain’s character is supposed to be brilliant, but can’t see through the weakest of twists. Casey Affleck’s character inexplicably wants his suffering wife and child to die on his farm, even when offered the chance of medical care and safety.

Interstellar uses wafer-thin characters, cheap storytelling twists (way too much deus ex machina for one movie), and dresses it up using first-rate special effects and long-winded technobabble to make us believe that we’re watching something important and goads us to care more about the character’s plights than they do themselves. I didn’t buy it.

Grade: C

 

 

 

The Dark Knight Rises

It’s been a long eight years for Bruce Wayne.

Setting aside the cape and cowl after the events of The Dark Knight, Bruce holes himself up in his mansion like a Howard Hughes recluse – complete with dishevelled appearance, patchy facial hair and questionable hygiene. Peacetime, while it may have been good for Gotham, has not been good for its hero. Funny that the only thing to bring Bruce out of his stupor is not his city, but a new threat: a mysterious terrorist known as Bane.

That’s about the end of my plot synopsis – to mention it otherwise reeks of redundancy, and there are many other (more well-written) reviews that can do a much better job of explaining it.

I think this was probably the weakest of Nolan’s Batman trilogy. It doesn’t help that it came after The Dark Knight, which is arguably the perfect blockbuster for its adept balancing of pathos, spectacle, storyline, and intelligence – with the most charismatic screen villain in recent memory as a cherry on top. That being said, this is by no means a bad film. It’s actually quite good in fact – it’s just overshadowed by the brilliance of its predecessors.

What’s disappointing about The Dark Knight Rises is that it revisits the League of the Shadows – the villainous cabal from Batman Begins – villains that were more of an afterthought in the first film than an entire concept to build the trilogy around. What I mean by that is the first film used the League of Shadows as a stepping stone for Bruce Wayne to develop the skills needed to become Batman, and once that transformation was complete, they weren’t necessary anymore – thus their defeat in the first film. The Dark Knight had different ambitions – neglecting to mention the League of Shadows (at least to my recollection) and allowing the central villain of that film – the Joker – to survive for a sequel. The Joker was a villain to build the franchise around, the League of Shadows merely a placeholder for better things – but real life tragedy hampered the trilogy going in that direction.

Rises also suffers from unfocused storytelling, an overly complicated plot to destroy Gotham, and too many characters and comic references shoehorned into its bloated running time. But after watching this, I realized that any criticisms of the film are minor irritants – this may not be the perfect blockbuster, but this is the type of blockbuster audiences deserve. Nolan and co. may have overreached with this film, which lacks the consistency of the other two, but it’s still a satisfying and worthy conclusion to one of the best trilogys – blockbuster, superhero, or otherwise – to hit theatres. Summer movies don’t have to be dumb – and the success of Nolan’s Batman series proves that audiences aren’t dumb either. And that counts for something.

Grade: B+

Rant of the Day: “It was all a dream” (or Outlandish Film Interpretations)

Isaac Asimov is a master storyteller. One of the first books I ever read by him was a collection of short stories called Robot Visions. What I love about Asimov is that he makes rules for the universes that he is writing for and then slavishly sticks to them. For his robot stories, he created the Three Laws of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

One of my favorite stories from the collection is called “Runaround” (which is also the first story where Asimov’s three laws were explicitly laid out). The story deals with a robot that needs to get a rare element on Mercury’s surface in order to repair the life support system for a mining base where two scientists are. However, rather than harvesting the element as it was asked, the robot is found to be running around the pool in a massive circle. The scientists realize that the rare element is dangerous to the robot, which conflicts with the Third Law (self-preservation). Generally, this would be trumped by the Second Law (obey human orders), but in this case, one of the scientists casually issued the order without a sense of urgency. The whole story thus revolves around a dilemma within Asimov’s rules: if the robot harvests the element, it conflicts with the Third Law, but if it doesn’t harvest the element, that conflicts with the Second Law. The ambiguity within the rules Asimov has laid out becomes the basis for the entire story, rather than the story being haphazardly adapted to arbitrary rules.

What does this have to do with movies? IMDb message boards, or more specifically, Outlandish Film Interpretations.

A lot of films have ambiguous elements within them. These elements are then discussed on message boards across the world with various voices explaining what they mean. Sometimes the interpretations are credible, and help reveal a subtle theme from the film that you didn’t realize. Other times (well, most of the time) these interpretations are outlandish and ridiculous. I remember reading an interpretation about Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige where someone argued that Christian Bale’s character was just a figment of Hugh Jackman’s character’s imagination. What?

The problem with these Outlandish Film Interpretations is that they don’t follow the rules that the film has set out for them. In The Prestige, the two characters compete with one another to become the greatest magician in the world. They both have romantic love interests, and the characters put on magic shows that generate large audiences. Where can you explain that Christian Bale’s character is imaginary within the confines of the film? The short answer is: you can’t. You have to go outside the boundaries (and rules) of the film to make this argument credible – i.e. the “It was all a dream” explanation and therefore the rules of the film are not legitimate. This explanation can work in some cases (David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive…still one of my least favorite film experiences). But why not interpret a film based on the rules within it?

Asimov’s short stories outline the numerous ways a few simple rules can be interpreted and creatively reworked for an almost limitless supply of explanations (or discussions). So why throw out the rule book when you can work with it? Here’s the rule to avoid an Outlandish Film Interpretation: Everything you see onscreen is not a lie, unless explicitly indicated otherwise. This avoids the confusion of labeling the Lord of the Rings character Gimli a metaphor for labour rising up against the technological aggression of the industrial revolution (Sauron’s forces). He’s not. Gimli is a dwarf, Sauron’s forces are evil gremlins, goblins, and other creatures that go bump in the night. This first rule also helps with a film like The Usual Suspects, which does explicitly indicate that some of what we see onscreen is a lie – this can be interpreted within the world of the film (i.e. how much is bullshit and how much of the story has truth to it). Follow this, and the discussions based around the film seem much more interesting, rather than outlandish.

This rant was written because I’m tired of seeing people arguing that characters only exist as figments of other characters imaginations. The damning legacy of Fight Club continues to haunt our viewings of films (though it did explicitly state that a character was imaginary, and therefore adheres to the rule of a Decent Film Interpretation).

4 Directors Who Have Never Made A Bad Film

Great directors make great films. But at the same time, in careers that span decades and multiple films it’s almost unavoidable to occasionally make a stinker. The five directors below have never made a bad film, and though most are in the early stages of their careers, this is a pretty incredible accomplishment. If you ever browse the video store aisle and see the name of one of these directors on the cover, you know it’s going to be quality. Hopefully they can continue their streaks in the years to come.

1. Christopher Nolan

He’s made comic book movies (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight). He’s made film noirs (Following, Memento, Insomnia). And he’s made the most original summer blockbuster of the past decade (Inception). Is there anything Christopher Nolan can’t do? Maybe comedy, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Nolan imbues all his films with an amazing visual style and intelligence. He doesn’t play down to the audience or use cheap tricks or gimmicks (cough, 3D) to get people into the theater. At the same time, he makes mainstream films that both cinephiles and casual moviegoers love, an incredible feat within itself. To not make a bad film on top of that is miracle. Studios love Nolan because he’s a sure thing. No matter what film he makes it goes on to destroy box office records and win almost unanimous critical acclaim. No wonder they give him free rein to do whatever he wants, because whatever money they put into a Nolan film they’ll make back threefold, and then some.

The Best Christopher Nolan film: Memento. Inception‘s great, but Memento is still my favourite Nolan film. It’s famous for being the film that has a plot that plays in reverse chronological order but its more than just that. It’s a dark exploration of revenge and the human mind, and it also has a killer ending (and beginning).

2. Jason Reitman

If you’re the son of a famous, renowned filmmaker you better come out knocking the ball out of the park. Jason Reitman’s done that three times already. Thank You for Smoking was an incredible satire with arguably Aaron Eckhart’s best performance ever (sorry Two-Face!). Reitman followed that up with Juno, nominated for Best Picture, and then followed that one up with Up in the Air, also nominated for Best Picture.

Reitman’s talent is bringing out career-best performances from his actors (and also career-starting ones…Ellen Page). The action in a Reitman film comes from not explosions or shoot-outs but from verbal tennis matches and snarky wit. The dialogue in Juno could get a little grating at times, especially in the beginning, but somehow Reitman was able to make the Diablo Cody script sound natural and believable, something that the second film she wrote (Jennifer’s Body) wasn’t able to manage (the worst line was a character asking another if she was “Jello,” meaning jealous. It sounded like what thirty-year old mom would say to appear cool in front of her teenager’s friends.)

Best Jason Reitman movie: Up in the Air. This is probably the best film about the 2008 recession because it doesn’t spend its time pointing fingers at greedy executives or have hero who’s trying to make things right.  It’s not about how or why the recession happened. It just did.  The news gave us statistics that 50,000 jobs were lost in a given month, families were being evicted from their homes, and billions of dollars were being poured into the banks to correct things. But what we didn’t see was how people carried on. And that’s exactly what Reitman chose to focus on.

3. Darren Aronofsky

Love his films or hate them, Aronofsky has an uncompromising artistic vision that carries over from one film to the next. He’s created some of the most visceral and intense sequences on film this side of David Cronenberg and created the ultimate “Say no to Drugs” PSA (Requiem for a Dream). Most of his films flirt with the horror genre (and if he was categorized as a horror director he may have made a few of the scariest films ever made), but he’s also directed an incredible character study (The Wrestler) and an under appreciated masterpiece about immortality and love (The Fountain).

For one of the uniquest visions in cinema, check out an Aronofsky film. They’re movies unlike any other you’ve seen before (unless it’s another Aronofsky film).

Best Aronofsky film: Black Swan. For a film about ballet, it’s incredible that it’s one of the most intense experiences of the year. Aronofsky ratchets up the tension with each scene, building up the suspense to an unbearable degree. By the time it was over, I was exhausted. It’s exhilarating when a film can accomplish that.

4. Ben Affleck

Yes, he’s only made two films as a director so he’s not exactly a statistical wonder. But if we add in the film he wrote with Matt Damon (Good Will Hunting), that puts his tally to three good movies, which is an impressive feat (let’s not talk about his streak of acting in horrible films).

Affleck has made two great crime thrillers (Gone Baby Gone and The Town) set in Boston. Like Woody Allen and New York, Boston is Affleck’s muse and it shows in his films. He painstakingly recreates the atmosphere of the city onscreen, hiring real Bostonians in bit parts or as extras and capturing the ethos of the place brilliantly. It’s been said that Affleck may be this generation’s Clint Eastwood. It’ll be interesting to see if his directorial efforts can live up to that statement.

Best Affleck Movie: The Town. It has great bank heist sequences and an incredible shoot-out in Fenway Park. What more do you need to know?

Honorable Mention: Every other film of David Fincher.

There’s a pattern to the films of Fincher. Like the Star Trek movies, only his even-numbered efforts are great films. Just look at this scientific list:

1. Alien 3 (Bad)

2. Seven (Great)

3. The Game (Not great, but decent)

4. Fight Club (Great)

5. Panic Room (meh.)

6. Zodiac (Great)

7. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (However you judge its merits, its not great)

8. The Social Network (The Best Picture Winner of 2010…though I still haven’t seen it)

So if we only count even-numbered Fincher efforts, he’s the fifth director who’s never made a bad film.

The Ending of Inception

Inception is, without a doubt, one of the best movies of the year. On most of the critics’ lists it’s at least mentioned somewhere in the top ten or as an honorable mention. It’s that rare type of film: a thinking-man’s blockbuster. Who knew that things like discussions about the subconscious and explosions would go so well together?

But beyond the pyrotechnics and dreams-within-a-dream and the staggeringly high body count (it’s somehow rated PG, meaning that the MPAA decided that people could discern that the deaths happening in the film weren’t actually happening, a feat that the audience can’t achieve by themselves unless a movie explicitly tells them “this isn’t reality” – but enough of my grumblings) the lasting impression the film made on movie-goers was: what the hell happened at the end?

Leo ponders whether to shoot himself or play spin the totem again.

[Warning: If you haven’t seen the movie, I will be discussing the ending. No false advertising here.]

The funny thing about this question is that it’s the least interesting discussion topic you can have about the movie. Instead of wondering about the is-it-or-isn’t-it-going-to-fall totem, we could be talking about how the entire film is just one big disguised metaphor for filmmaking, the level of detail Christopher Nolan and his team spent on little things like the film’s score, or how Juno didn’t seem to be that much of wunderkind architect (I mean, it took her three tries it make a puzzle…on paper). But alas, the most interesting thing for people to discuss is the question of the ending: is Cobb in reality, or is he still dreaming?

The first time I saw the film I had a few different theories (like pretty much everyone else did). The main one was that I thought the never-ending spinning totem wasn’t a sign that Cobb was still dreaming but an after-effect of Saito/Saito’s projection handling the totem while in limbo. Rather than designating reality from the dream world, the totem was in effect broken after being touched by another being (that was one of the first of many rules…don’t let someone else touch your totem or else they know the weight and then it defeats the whole purpose of the thing). So there was that.

But having now seen the film a second time and having read a telling article in Wired where Christopher Nolan skirts around definitively explaining the ending but leaves another clue, that is, “that the most important emotional thing is that Cobb’s not looking at [the totem],”  I’m pretty sure that it’s time to end this discussion and put it to rest.

Cobb’s not looking at the totem. This is the key take-away from the ending. The spinning totem matters the most to Cobb, and yet, he doesn’t even care about it. This little object is supposed to tell him whether or not what he is experiencing is real. But he’s doesn’t spin it at the end to check the validity of his reality because he doesn’t stop to check it. He spins it, and then walks away towards his children. He’s leaving the totem behind; he doesn’t need it anymore. He’s accepting a new life. A real one.

The ending of Inception is just a MacGuffin that leads the discussion after the film but distracts and misleads the audience from the real purpose of the movie. Take a quick look at the driving motive behind the film: Cobb wants to get back to America and be with his children and he will do anything to accomplish that (including being a glorified bank robber, except of ideas and secrets instead of cash and diamonds). And at the end, he’s finally accomplished what he set out to do from the beginning of the film. Though Inception takes place in a world of dreams, it’s not really interested in examining them (see the movie Waking Life, arguably the best movie about dreams, for that). It’s just a new setting for a familiar story: that of the man who will do anything for his family.

What has to be realized is that the ending is the same whether or not the totem falls or keeps spinning forever: Cobb doesn’t look. He’s done dreaming. Because he’s achieved his dream. It’s the rest of us sitting in the audience who can’t understand that and urge Cobb to look. If he doesn’t confirm that he’s in reality, how are we to know? But Cobb doesn’t care what you or I think, he hardly cares about the characters he works with in the film, and he recklessly endangers their lives (through his projection of Mal) in order to achieve his goal of seeing his children again. It could be reality. It could be a dream. But finally, for once, it doesn’t matter. Cobb has kids and that’s all he needs. The movie’s over.

I hope that finally puts the ending of Inception to rest. I don’t want to see any more message boards with viewers counting the seconds it takes for the totem to topple, or elaborate theories about how Mal’s ghost haunts Limbo and somehow transmorphified into Saito for the thirty-five seconds that he’s in Cobb’s presence and used some black magic to keep him dreaming forever. Or that Adriane feels sympathy for Cobb that she makes a make-believe dream world for him and traps him there. That’s not what this movie’s about.

Let’s talk about the real question of Inception: what does Saito gain from their covert operation? Of course, he explains his motives by wanting to keep the business arena “fair” because the Fischer company is becoming too big for him to compete with. But that doesn’t ring entirely true. I mean, he’s not exactly the most benevolent man (he does dispatch of the first Architect fairly ruthlessly) and wanting to keep things “fair” doesn’t seem to be part of the man’s character. He’s the type to say “life isn’t fair” while throwing a homeless man into oncoming traffic and using a $100 bill to light his cigar. But I digress.

Back to that damn spinning top I guess.

A Dream (feat. Christopher Nolan)

I had a dream last night.

It involved the as-of-yet-untitled and probably not even in production yet Dark Knight sequel. Batman 3.1, if you will (Batman Forever being 3.0).

I was in a dark theatre and everyone was buzzing in their seats. It was either opening night or a sneak preview of Christopher Nolan’s latest film and nobody could stop talking about how excited they were to see it. And then the lights when down and the curtain went up.

The first shot was a close-up on a woman’s lips. I think the camera pulled back to reveal that it was Helena Bonham Carter, looking pretty much the same as her character in Fight Club. She might’ve been the new Catwoman or something, I’m not quite sure. Anyway, at this point, I knew something was amiss. The film was really grainy, and it looked as if the cinematographer was using a handheld camera. I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone because everyone next to me was enjoying the movie and whispering amongst themselves. Were they not seeing what I was seeing?

And then the scene switched. And pretty much everyone was wearing green. I thought maybe this had something to do with the Riddler likely being the next villain. And then there was Robert De Niro in a green suit puffing a huge cigar. I don’t really know if he was the Riddler or just a mafia kingpin. I’ll never know.

The last scene was Christian Bale and Michael Caine sitting in two large armchairs that looked like they were taken directly from the Matrix set. They were babbling on about something and Bale started laughing, almost as if this was the set of Kelly and Regis and Caine was Kelly.

The last thought I had before I woke up was how disappointed I was with the new Batman film.

Was it all just a dream? I don’t know.

But the one thing I will say is this: if the third Nolan Batman film is disappointing…you heard it here first.