Guest Review: Intersellar (2014)

by Koshcat

I am of two minds when it comes to Interstellar the science fiction drama directed by Christopher Nolan: I liked it but the forced tensions bug me.

Overall the basic plot is simple. Crop blight is slowly destroying Earth’s crops and threatening humanity with starvation and lack of oxygen. Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is a former NASA pilot, now widower farmer trying to raise two kids. A message from a “ghost” to his daughter leads him to a secret program to find a new planet for colonization.

A wormhole mysteriously appears near Saturn that allows passage to a distant galaxy where Professor Brand (Michael Caine) has sent 12 volunteers to find a suitable planet. They have transmitted that there are three promising sites near a black hole. There are two plans for colonization: A) move everyone from Earth to the new planet and B) repopulate the new planet with frozen embryos. Professor Brand is trying to work out plan A but the math doesn’t compute.

Cooper’s daughter, Murphy, joins Professor Brand in hopes of deriving the right formula but she needs the information hidden inside a black hole. Mr. Cooper agrees to pilot the spaceship with hopes of quickly finding the right planet and then returning to his family. Due to relativity, what takes Cooper months turns into decades back home. The first two planets turn out to be duds and Cooper sacrifices his life to push his crew mate Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway), who is Professor Brand’s daughter, to the third and eventually suitable planet. His sacrifice is to fall into the blackhole where he is able to learn the secret formula and transmit it to his daughter as the “ghost” allowing the rest of humanity to be saved.

SPOILER ALERT

Why I liked this film, despite the gargantuan plot holes, is it focused more on the story and characters rather than the CGI to move the plot. The characters have fear and despair but other still have hope. Nobody is evil for evil’s sake. The closest “bad guys” might either be Professor Brand or Dr. Mann (Matt Damon), one of the first 12 astronauts. Professor Brand has faked the calculations for years because he has decided it is physically impossible to implement plan A. Plan B was the plan all along but lied to Cooper so he would leave his family in hopes of finding a new place for them. This isn’t from a place of evil but a decision out of despair and rationality. Dr. Mann is trapped on an inhospitable planet to die alone and has been transmitting false data. He is afraid, weak, and a coward and tries to kill Cooper to get off the planet. His decision is based on irrationality not evil intent. There is no greedy politician trying to control the Earth or multinational company trying to get rich. And any movie that makes Matt Damon look like a dick is ok with me.

The CGI is beautiful and acts as a backdrop rather than the central plot. The story behind the development of the black hole is fascinating as the most up to date theoretical equations where entered into the rendering software which then developed the visual effect (LINK). Finally, how many movies can discuss and show the theory of relativity and still keep people in their seats? This is what true Sci-Fi should look like.

What distracts me from the movie is the unnecessary and forced conflicts. Let’s start with the blight. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of biology knows that a disease that attacks completely different species is extremely rare to the point of impossibility. For the billions spent on building spaceships and sending people through wormholes, couldn’t they have built self-contained cities? It is also unlikely a blight would effect the plants underwater, wouldn’t it be easier to live there? How about just developing plants immune to the blight? Maybe they shouldn’t be so anti-GMO.

The next is the lying by Professor Brand. Why does he need to lie? Why can’t he just say that he can’t complete the formula without more information? Another is Murphy being so pissed at her dad for leaving that she won’t speak to him for decades and then accuses him of lying to her about the possibility of his never returning. I understand being angry and sad that her dad left, but couldn’t that emotion be better served to get him back? Eventually it does but her resentments simmers for years and seems like wasted energy. There is also tension between Murphy and her brother, Tom (Casey Affleck), that doesn’t seem to make any sense. Why did Tom punch her boyfriend who only wanted to help his family? If Tom had given up on life, why was he still farming? Why does Casey, a much better actor, get less attention than Ben?

Another issue is why do the robots have a sense of humor level? An honesty level? I would want my robot helpers to be boring and brutally honest. Having the potential planets around a blackhole leads to interesting scientific dilemmas, but seems like a terrible place to find a new home. Dr. Mann lying about the planet so he wouldn’t die alone makes sense to me, but killing the other astronauts doesn’t. It leads to a great scene where Cooper has to stabilize the ship, but I guess a simple malfunction or stray asteroid wouldn’t have provided enough tension. Finally, the whole scene inside the blackhole is all dues ex machina and Cooper’s return was, frankly, lame.

I watched it a second time with my wife and kids. My wife and daughter where crying through the whole movie and were irritated at the end despite the happy ending. I found this to be interesting. This movie touches and pulls on a lot of emotional strings, which a good movie should, but perhaps it was too much? I like the movie more than I disliked it because Nolan at least seems to understand that a good movie is dependent on story and characters and not how many spaceships are moving behind Yoda.

Thoughts?

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Summer Of Films: Now You See Me (2013)

Magic is about misdirection. Unfortunately, so is Now You See Me. On the surface, this is a heist film in which the ultra-clever heist gets carried out by a group of impressive young stage magicians. The marketing even suggested that the audience would get a chance to guess how they do it. But nothing about this film is real. To the contrary, it presents disjointed and nonsensical highlights while trying to make you believe you’re seeing a workable heist film. Ultimately, the film is stylish enough to be enjoyable, but it’s very shallow with some major flaws.

The Plot

Now You See Me starts with four talented street magicians getting invited by an unknown benefactor to perform in Vegas as “The Four Horsemen.” These are: the arrogant illusionist Danny Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), hypnotist Merrit McKinney (Woody Harrelson), escape artist Henley Reeves (Ilsa Fisher), and pickpocket Jack Wilder (Dave Franco).

To end their first show, they declare that they will rob a bank. To pull off this trick, they invite a French citizen on stage. This man is an account holder in the Credit Republicain de Paris bank, and he appears to be teleported to Paris, where he turns on a huge vacuum which pulls the money out of the bank’s vault and spews it out over the Vegas audience. Everyone is amazed, but the FBI is not amused. When the FBI discovers that the bank really was robbed, they send Agent Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo) and Interpol Agent Melanie Laurent to investigate.

From there, the film becomes a game of cat and mouse as the outmatched FBI agents chase their own tails while trying to catch the magicians, who continue to up the ante. Their next trick, for example, involves robbing the show’s sponsor Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine), an insurance company magnate who wrongfully denied thousands of claims in the city in which they perform the trick. Naturally, they drain his bank account while transferring his money to each of the people whose claims were wrongfully denied. He then hires Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman), who makes money revealing magicians’ tricks and debunking claims of magic, to pursue them.

Ultimately, the film finishes with a protracted chase scene in which the magicians rob a defense contractor while trying to evade Freeman, the FBI and the local police. The benefactor then reveals himself and his motives, and you won’t guess who it is because it makes no sense.

Smoke and Mirrors and Misdirection

This film functions by misdirection. On the surface, this film involves an ultra-clever heist perpetrated by a group of talented young stage magicians. They do this heist right before the eyes of the frustrated FBI and a talented debunker, and as they do, they keep the audience guessing what will happen next and what just happened. And if you shut off your brain, this heist will rival any other heist film for complexity, originality, and surprise.

But there’s a problem: the heist isn’t real. And I don't mean, this probably wouldn't work in real life. What I mean is that the film doesn't even pretend to show you a possible heist, it just shows you hints of heists and then tries to trick you into thinking you saw more.

To give you some examples, it doesn’t take long to realize that they would need to know too much information to pull off these tricks. How do they find everyone who got screwed by the insurance company and invite them to attend the second show? How do they learn the account numbers and passwords to each of those people's saving accounts? The film never tells you. Somehow they also get them all to use the same banking software on their phones, software that doesn’t exist and which impossibly gives you a real-time ticker on the amount of money in your account as if deposits were added in penny by penny. Then they need to find a way to get Caine’s bank to conduct a thousand wire transfers in real time, at their command to work with the stage show, late at night. Again, they never make any attempt to explain how this was done.

At the same time, they need to know if the guys who will chase them will run to the left or the right. They arrange traffic stunts that Hollywood’s best would struggle with on a closed set, only they do it on the open road during rush hour. They participate in heists they could not physically perform. Again, the details are never explained.

Even when they explain things, they don't explain them. Consider the bank robbery in Paris. It seems impossible. Then Freeman comes along and explains that they did it the day before, and they did it by replacing the real money with fake money so no one would notice. The film even shows you a flashback of these characters hovering around the bank in armored car uniforms. Ruffalo then asks how they made the fake money vanish. To this, Freeman responds “flash paper” and he causes some to burn up in his hand. Oh, now it all makes sense. Actually, it doesn’t. At no point is an explanation offered for where the fake money actually came from, how they got it into the bank, how they removed the good money and replaced it with the bad, how they got the good money to Vegas overnight, how they set off the flash paper, why no one noticed the residue, or any other part of how the heist would need to work. All you get is an assurance that it happened followed by the debunker declaring their actions explained and brilliant.

The whole film is like this. Throughout this film, you are given explanations for how things supposedly happened that only touch upon the highlights of what needed to happen, e.g. “oh, there were blanks in the gun,” but there is never any explanation for how they actually made this happen. And the few times there are suggestions, like seeing them dressed up as armored car drivers, only raises a million more questions. But each time, the cops or the debunker are there to smooth it over and tell you that this is indeed how it happened, now stop worrying about that! Meanwhile, the characters drone on heavy-handedly in a near narrative (it’s the narrative of the magic act superimposed on the rest of the action) about the nature of magic being about sleight of hand in such an authoritative way that it basically comes across as the film telling you to stop doubting the heist. This is the equivalent of having characters scream, “This is the real world! It’s not like we’re in a movie!”

This is an interesting way to make a heist film. On the one hand, I suspect that a good chunk of the audience won’t be using their brains as they watch the film, so they will feel like everything has been fully explained. But for people whose brains remain active while watching the film, this method becomes a problem. For them, the suspension of disbelieve just keeps getting harder and harder throughout, and ultimately you are left feeling like you are just watching a lie because the film never even tries to make any of it real. At that point, the question becomes whether the gloss and veneer of the heist is enough to overcome the realization that the whole thing is being pulled out of the writer’s rear end.

In many ways, that makes this film very much like Ocean’s Thirteen, which similarly abandoned believability for style. In Ocean’s Thirteen, that worked because they presented a world you wanted to embrace and characters with relationships you wanted to be part of. Here, the true fatal flaw is the casting.

Jesse Eisenberg is unpleasant. Here he’s smug and angry and you don’t like him. Woody Harrelson always plays a jerk, but he typically makes his character likeable by letting him take a beating, which lets him have an epiphany which brings the audience to his side. Here, his misbehavior is never punished and he gets to let his jerk side run unrepentant. Ruffalo is an ass politically, but can be likable on film. Only, here he comes across as angry and lifeless. Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine both play characters you aren’t supposed to like. The rest of the cast is non-existent. So what you’re left with is a deeply unlikable cast you can’t rally around. They never give you a grand look into the world of magic either. So you have little to latch onto.

All in all, this is an interesting but very shallow film. It would have served the film better to have actually presented a genuine heist scenario or more likable actors. Still, it’s probably worth seeing, if for nothing else but its potential. Just don't expect to be impressed if you pull back the veneer.

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Film Friday: Zulu (1964)

Zulu is one of my favorite films. It’s a war film about the 1879 Battle of Rorke’s Drift between a small detachment of British soldier at a farm in South Africa and an army of Zulus. It’s one of those films that does everything right.

** spoiler alert **

Plot

Zulu is an historical war drama about the Battle of Rorke’s Drift. On January 22, 1879, the British Empire invaded Zululand. Eleven days later, a force of 20,000 Zulu warriors attacked a British column of 1,800 soldiers. The Zulus overran the column and killed 1,300 British. A few days later, a force of 4,000 Zulus moved against nearby Rorke’s Drift, a farmhouse where around 150 British soldiers had set up a field hospital. This is where Zulu begins.

As the Zulus surround and attack the field hospital, the British inside put up a series of defenses. Between attacks you get to know the soldiers and you see their true characters emerge. You’ve got the dissenter who turns out to be a hero (Private Henry Hook – James Booth). The hero who thinks he’s a coward, but really isn’t (Lt. Bromhead – Michael Caine). The every-man who uses his brain and his will to save the unit (Lt. Chard – Stanley Baker). You’ve got a conflict with a minister (Rev. Otto Witt – Jack Hawkins) who wants them not to fight. You’ve got conflict between the commanders. You’ve got conflict between the soldiers. And you have a relentless, courageous and powerful enemy. The film ends in a draw, with the Zulus saluting the British soldiers’ bravery.

What Makes This Film So Interesting

This film is interesting on several levels. First, you have the cast. Baker was a rising star who had been offered the role of James Bond in Dr. No, but was forced to turn it down. He died a few years after this film at the age of 48. Richard Burton does the narration. This was Michael Caine’s first starring role, and he almost didn’t get it. He had tried out for a different role before trying out for Bromhead. His screen-test went so poorly that Baker (who produced the film) wanted to replace him, but it was too late as shooting was scheduled to begin. The leader of the Zulus was played by Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who some of you might recall as the actual leader of the Zulu nation in the 1980s - he founded the Inkatha Freedom Party and allied himself with white South Africans against the ANC.

As an aside, due to apartheid laws, none of the Zulus could be paid for appearing in the film, so the director left them cattle as gifts.

Secondly, this film respects both sides. One of the reason most modern war films feel hollow even though their effects are great is because the enemy is typically presented as cardboard. Be the enemy Arabs, giant bugs, robots, or Nazis, the enemy is no longer humanized in Hollywood. That robs the audience of any sense of realism. Basically, instead of seeing this a struggle between real people, where both sides put their lives on the line for what they believe in, you get a videogame where you watch supermen take down pixilated enemies. Even worse, since the enemies are no longer real people, Hollywood allows the supermen to kill them in droves to keep the audience entertained. This robs the heroes of their achievement. They are no longer mere mortals struggling and overcoming a powerful, believable, well-matched or overwhelming enemy, they are characters in a shooting gallery taking down the enemy at will.

Zulu was before all of that. In Zulu, the Zulus are courageous and dangerous. This is no simple fight and there is a really good chance the British will fail. In fact, you keep wondering throughout how in the world they will prevail, and the film reinforces this by showing that the British are reaching the end of their rope as the film nears its climax. That makes the ending truly spectacular. Indeed, the climax isn’t a battle, it’s a non-battle as the Zulus do a show of respect for the British rather than attack, and then they withdraw. That adds a really strong emotional punch to the film. Not only are you shocked (and relieved) that the climax you expected didn’t come, but you feel a sense of pride that both sides have earned the others’ respect. It makes you feel like you watched something truly special, i.e. a battle between the best. It also lends an air of authenticity to the film (even though that didn’t happen in real life) because it makes you realize that these were real people on both sides. War film should go back to this idea, because it really works.

The final aspect of this film which makes it so interesting are all the messages throughout and how subtlety they are delivered. Moreover, while the film was directed by Cy Endfield, who was blacklisted in Hollywood, and it intended to lean left, it almost seems more libertarian. Consider this.

● The film presents an anti-empire message. It does so by showing that the carnage proves pointless and by making it clear that no one seems to know why they are in South Africa, except Chard who is there to build a bridge. At the time, this would have been seen as a message of the left, which was anti-empire and embracing the anti-war movement. However, this rings more libertarian right than progressive left, as the modern left seeks to impose their beliefs on everyone. Indeed, the left were big on empire building throughout history, except for the brief moment when they wanted the British Empire dismantled. And even that was quickly replaced by leftist intervention from the Soviets and their allies, and from Western-leftists pushing their beliefs on indigenous people. Really, the only people saying we should leave everyone else alone to live their own lives are American libertarians.

More interestingly, this message and the anti-war message are only hinted at throughout the film, with characters asking why they are here and finally with Bromhead being disgusted at the carnage he sees – aside from this, there are no speeches, no lectures, and no demonizations. This actually makes these messages amazingly effective because it leaves it up to the audience to reach their own conclusion based on what appears to be a simple presentation of facts rather than arguments. This makes a stronger message because people feel that they reach the conclusion on their own and it takes away the sense that the messages are propaganda.

● The film also makes an anti-elite message where the effete upper-class Bromhead proves to lack the competence of the blue-collar Chard. Bromhead stands in as the representative of the British upper crust. He is stiff, smug, and arrogant. He can tell you his heritage back before time began and he sees himself as the descendent of the heroes who shaped the world. But he’s also incompetent and cowardly. Chard is a mutt. He has no background, he’s clearly middle-class, and he got here on skill alone. He is an engineer, a profession you must earn rather than inherit, and he quickly proves to be everything Bromhead is not – thoughtful, competent, brave, and a solid leader. The message here is very anti-elitist and pro-meritocracy. At the time, this would have been a leftist message as they wanted to topple the existing power structure, but in hindsight, this is highly libertarian. Indeed, meritocracy is a conservative/libertarian idea, with the left favoring rule by elites and elite-appointed experts.

As an interesting aside, there have been suggestions that Bromhead may be homosexual based on certain behaviors he exhibits, particularly being “foppish” with a whip. I cannot say if this was truly intended, but it does seem to be suggested as a further reason to look down on Bromhead, i.e. the idea that the elite are abnormal and perverted – another interesting flip for the left.

All of this makes for a truly fascinating film. The film is beautifully shot, having been filmed in national parks in South Africa. The costumes are perfect. The acting and writing is excellent, and it’s neat to see Michael Caine in his first major role. The interaction of the soldiers is believable and not at all cliché. The messages are powerful and they are made all the more powerful because you are left to reach them yourself. And ultimately, this is a heck of a war film because the enemy isn’t downgraded to cartoon status so you’re never really sure if the heroes can prevail. It is a tense film.

I highly recommend this film.

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Film Friday: The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

With Christmas just around the corner it’s time for a holiday film. There is no more quintessential Christmas story than Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” This story is so perfect that it’s been adapted at least 22 times in film and dozens of other times in other ways. So why is my favorite version the Muppet version? Read on. . .

The Plot

The story should be familiar to all. Ebenezer Scrooge (Michael Caine) is a money lender and a rotten man. He’s nasty and mean- spirited to his employees and unbelievably cheap. In fact, he’s so mean-spirited that his one loyal employee, Bob Cratchit (Kermit the Frog), must beg him to give the employees the day off for Christmas. Bah humbug!

On Christmas Eve, Scrooge is visited by the ghosts of his former business partners, Jacob and Robert Marley (Statler and Waldorf). They have been condemned to an afterlife in chains for their evil deeds, deeds which are shared by Scrooge. They have come to warn Scrooge that he will be visited by three ghosts who will show Scrooge the error of his ways.

These ghosts include the Ghost of Christmas Past, who shows Scrooge that he was once a decent man, the Ghost of Christmas Present, who shows Scrooge how miserable he is compared to others who value families over money, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, who reveals that Scrooge will die unlamented and his miserliness will lead to the death of Tiny Tim. Naturally, Scrooge changes his ways and the story ends happily.

Why The Muppet Version Is The Best

There are many fantastic version of this story. The 1951 version is excellent as is the 1984 version with George C. Scott as Scrooge. Bill Murray gives us an excellent modern version in Scrooged. Even the most recent Doctor Who had a nice adaptation of this. But of them all, the Muppets are the best. Why?

Different types of stories require different methods of storytelling to be effective. Alien would not have worked as a musical. Ghostbusters would not have worked as a drama. And A Christmas Carol works best as a fable, not as a drama as it is typically portrayed.

The goal of a fable is to impart certain lessons or warnings to the audience. This is done by a narrator who talks directly to the audience, explaining the motivations of the characters and their flaws, describing their mistakes, explaining the consequences of those mistakes, and then summarizing the lessons learned. It’s like a legal brief presented with puppets.

Dramas, by comparison, have none of this. Instead, they require the audience to draw its own conclusions from the actions and words of the characters and the consequences of the plot. Moreover, characters in dramas must come across as real before we can accept their plight and find their stories interesting. Characters in fables do not. In a fable, the only “real” person is the narrator who tells us the fable to impart some point. So long as the narrator entertains us sufficiently, the story is a good one without regard to how true the details of the story seem. Because of this, fables can be told in parts, i.e. vignettes, and we can simply be told of necessary changes in the characters or their circumstances between scenes. Dramas, on the other hand, must demonstrate such changes.

A Christmas Carol is, at its core, a fable. It is the moral of Scrooge’s failings and how he came to save himself. It is a series of vignette, each of which affect Scrooge differently and Scrooge has significant growth from scene to scene which is not shown in the plot. Thus, the best structure for telling this story is the fable structure, with a narrator to walk us through the story, point by point, and explain how each segment of the story, i.e. each vignette, affects Scrooge. Further, Scrooge is too one-dimensional to be a “real” character. This is intentional. Scrooge is an archetype of our worst, greediest, miserly natures, and he works best when we see him as such -- as part of ourselves rather than as a real person to whom these events transpire.

This is why the Muppet version is the best, because they treat this story as a fable. Gonzo acts as Dickens the narrator. Caine brilliantly provides the wide mood swings needed to be an archetype. And the Muppet players provide important levity and breaks to let us digest each scene before we move on and to distract us enough to let us think sufficient time has passed for Scrooge to undergo the personality changes needed. George C. Scott’s version may be excellent, but it is a drama and it lacks these critical elements which connect us to the heart of the story.

Finally, let me add two things. Michael Caine is an incredible actor. He never disappoints and he doesn’t disappoint here. Indeed, Caine does something brilliant. By soft-pedaling Scrooge’s cruelty and retaining his sense of humor, though he has misdirected it in cynical directions, Caine plays Scrooge not as a cruel man who must change his nature, but as a decent man who has lost his way. This connects us better to Scrooge than prior versions because (1) it is harder to connect with a truly cruel Scrooge because none of us wishes to see any part of ourselves as cruel, and (2) it is easier to believe a return to our better natures than a fundamental change of character.

And lastly, the Muppets deserve tremendous credit for playing this film “straight.” Specifically, the Muppets are adept at blending their antics into the film so you’re never distracted from the film. Too often when a comedian is brought into a film, they become a distraction (e.g. Robin Williams, Robin Williams, Robin Williams) as they turn their time on screen into an advertisement for themselves. Not here. The Muppets do the things you love about them, but they do them quickly and within the confines of the storytelling. Thus, there are no breaks in the story where you feel like you’re about to watch a couple minutes of a generic Muppet routine jammed into the film.

These are all brilliant choices which put this version ahead of all the others.

So what are your favorite Christmas films?

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