Fashion Dress in The Present: Christopher Nolan
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Showing posts with label Christopher Nolan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christopher Nolan. Show all posts

Interstellar Review: Bad Habits Get In the Way of Greatness

Interstellar



Director: Christopher Nolan
Writers: Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway

When I walked out of the theater after Interstellar ended, a woman commented loudly, “Maybe they'll have translators waiting for us to explain to us what that meant.” Either she wasn't paying attention or she doesn't have working ears, because Interstellar is a movie that fails the old “show don't tell” test at every turn. How anyone could walk out of a theater confused by a movie so burdened by over explanation is astonishing to me. Director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception) has a habit of holding his audience's hands, not allowing his evocative visuals and stellar casts to do the heavy lifting they could. Maybe he isn't sure of the strength of his visual acumen or maybe he doesn't believe in his audience, but either way the result is preventing the audience from being able to make up their own minds about his movies. They tell us exactly the filmmaker's intent, an often suffocating one-way street that takes out a lot of the fun, and sometimes the longevity, from his films.

Interstellar suffers this problem more acutely than many of his other films. Whereas Inception was a movie built like a multilayered puzzle, with completely fictional rules that needed explaining, Interstellar takes place in a possible future for the world we live in, much of it well researched by Nolan and his screenwriter brother Jonathan. The concepts of relativity, space flight, global warming, wormholes, the effects of loneliness, and parenthood are explicated ad nauseam. It's a shame, too, because Nolan, through the use of the camera and his actors, especially conflicted protagonist Matthew McConaughey, makes the emotional effects – emotion being the thing cinema does best – tangible. When McConaughey explains his decision to go on the humanity-saving mission to Anne Hathaway's scientist-astronaut, he makes platitudes about how parenthood is all about making your children feel safe. This was made abundantly clear in his loving – and occasionally truth obfuscating – interactions with his children in the hour or so the (nearly three hour long) movie spends on a dying Earth. We don't need the movie to tell us this, because we're already hard-wired to understand visual stimuli, particularly the kind related to self-preservation. The same goes for Nolan hammering us with information about why the Earth is ravaged by climate change and how it works – we get it with the dust storms, the dying crops, the people dying of lung infections.

And unfortunately, the worst of it is in the space scenes, including a planet on which spending an hour equals seven years in Earth time. The initial mention of it is fine to make sure the audience understands the stakes, but the hemming and hawing McConaughey and company do once they land is exhausting and undercuts the thrill of seeing the existential danger facing them. This continues time and again, all the way through the climax, which takes place in what looks like a box covered in puke green plaid wrapping paper – go see the movie and you won't be able to unsee that description – a scene that could be done in complete silence and it would still be fairly clear, but with more subtlety and, heaven forbid, some ambiguity.

But I mean it when I say go see
Interstellar, because, for all its faults and distrust in the audience's ability to stick with it, it remains thrilling and emotionally satisfying – from a full range of emotions. I mentioned earlier how the first hour takes place on Earth, and despite the qualms with explanation, it's not boring. McConaughey's character, Cooper, is a man stuck in a bad situation trying to make the best of it. He's a former pilot and engineer pushed by circumstances into farming, which the conventional wisdom of The People says is the only truly noble occupation in a world where a harshly warming planet makes every morsel necessary – other occupations and ambitions must be put aside to ensure a survival that still isn't likely. He lost his wife because of that deemphasis on grander plans, and he sees things getting worse. His son is locked into a life of farming, too, because of mediocre test scores. His daughter, Murph (played by Mackenzie Foy as a child and Jessica Chastain as an adult), is clearly brilliant and driven to be in charge of her fate. The connection between father and daughter is the crux of the film, and the scene when McConaughey must say goodbye to Murph after deciding to embark on the adventure at the cost of possibly never seeing her again is a doozy, packed with the weight of Steven Spielberg's best – it makes sense, given that Spielberg was originally slated to be Interstellar's director. I got a lump in my throat, which is rare for me in a movie, and even rarer for a Nolan film, given his emphasis on the brain in lieu of the heart.


Interstellar is a solid adventure film despite its flaws, but its disappointment lies in how close it is to being a great one. The bones are in place for sublimity, but its constant insecure – whether that insecurity is linked to Nolan's belief in himself or the audience, I'm not 100 percent on – insistence on explaining itself shoots itself in the foot.

Some Movies out This Weekend, November 7, 2014

The three big releases this week all have something to do with science in one way or another. We have the latest from a Disney Animation Studios that has been on both popular and critical rolls for several consecutive releases, a space epic from one of the biggest blockbuster filmmakers of our day, and a biopic of one of science's most important figures.

Big Hero 6
Directors: Don Hall, Chris Williams
Writers: Don Hall, Jordan Roberts, Robert L. Baird, Duncan Rouleau, Paul Briggs
Starring: Ryan Potter, T.J. Miller, Scott Adsit, Damon Wayans Jr.



After a string of massive success with Tangled, Wreck It Ralph, and Frozen, Disney has dipped into the Marvel well – they own the comic book company – for their newest, about a boy, his robot, and a mystery involving bad looking guys with nano technology.

The adventure and CG animation look top notch, but it is the comedy that looks like the movie's driving force. Scott Adsit, formerly of TV's 30 Rock, plays Baymax, the artificially intelligent used car balloon man. The trailer has been all over the place before almost every movie I've seen recently, and Baymax seems on the verge of being the next big crowd pleasing character, with the now famous “Scotch tape sight gag” moment making people – including me, the guy who's seen the trailer probably 15 times now – laugh every time.

Interstellar
Director: Christopher Nolan
Writers: Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Wes Bentley



Christopher Nolan is one of the preeminent purveyors of blockbuster filmmaking these days. His smart, dark takes on superheroes (The Dark Knight trilogy), the world of magicians (The Prestige), and dream thieves (Inception) have done wonders for people looking for more than to shut their brains off while eating popcorn and watching explosions. However, deserved or not, Nolan has a reputation for being heartless, more concerned with the machinations of the brain than the ticker. In many ways, Interstellar seems like his attempt at Spielberg-inflected (Spielberg was the director originally attached to direct) warmth and spectacle.

Set in the near future, the world is falling apart because of climate change, and humans need to figure out what to do. Matthew McConaughey, a pilot, is recruited to search for a habitable planet to relocate the human race. He has to leave his family behind to maybe die, and from the trailers it looks like he's gone a while (Jessica Chastain plays his grown daughter, who is about 11 when he leaves), so there could be some big themes about abandonment and duty tossed about.

Interstellar is getting some mixed reviews, but overall people seem to enjoy it. We'll see.

The Theory of Everything
Director: James Marsh
Writer: Anthony McCarten
Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, David Thewlis




Stephen Hawking has probably contributed more to astrophysics than any other human being, alive or dead. That alone makes him an extraordinary figure. The fact that he's done it while overcoming a disease that paralyzed him and stole his ability to speak is even more remarkable. The Theory of Everything tracks that story, his love with his wife, Jane, and probably a healthy dose of simplification of Hawking's theories.

For all the likely schmaltz Рthe meet-cute in the trailer involves a charming discussion about how Tide makes clothes glow brighter in black lights Рthere's some pedigree here. Redmayne was one of the few bright spots of 2012's Les Mis̩rables and director Marsh directed the Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire. There's some harrowing stuff in Hawking's life, so the sentimentality of the trailer might give way to some harder-to-watch stuff later on.

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