On “The Goonies” vs “E.T.”

In a recent British “Most Cherished Children’s Films” poll, Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.” was ranked at number 17, while Richard Donner’s “The Goonies” clocked in at number 19 — this close placement spurring furious debate among cinephiles as to which was truly the greater film. In my book, such close a ranking is more indicative of rental fees, than quality. Spielberg’s “E.T.” is a film imagined with warmth, humor, and genuine insight. Spielberg is a master of making the fantastic feel a part of reality. For Spielberg, that ‘place where dreams are born’ is exclusive to the innocent soul of childhood, and that fleeting commodity of openness to discovery, wonder… and love. He brilliantly directs the young people in his films because he’s working from a heartfelt appreciation of those precious gifts exclusive to childhood, and not, like Donner, drawing on chunky, whinny youths as one-dimensional comedic tropes. Spielberg accomplished the same thing with adults in “Close Encounters,” showing the grown-up effects on everyday of life colliding with the fantastic, and directing Richard Dreyfuss and Melinda Dillion with such wisdom and finesse — asking them to shed their prejudices and re-experience seeing the world with fresh eyes — that few films generate finer emotion at their conclusion. But it is Spielberg’s special talent at directing children, like François Truffaut, which elevates “E.T.” to being far more than a “children’s movie.” The superlative performances he draws from Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore allows “E.T.” to transcend entertainment into art. Those performances aren’t touched by the actors in “The Goonies” (except by the always convincing Martha Plimpton), or few other movies aimed at young people. Despite their neck-and-neck finish in this latest poll, I find it inconceivable to rate “The Goonies” along side of “E.T.” For me, one is a popularly ranked popcorn movie, while the other is the film of a masterful auteur on childhood.

When Mom Goes Gunning: “Let Him Go”

Just came out of the theater after seeing Kevin Costner’s new film “Let Him Go,” and the more I think about the movie, the more I hate it. It’s not that I risked Covid-19 to do it – I want to help the movie industry floundering in disease, but the film, in retrospect, was just so lazy. It was like the thriller version of Denis Villeneuve and by Eric Heisserer’s exercise in enui among the aliens, “Arrival.” There’s so little on the screen during writer/director Thomas Bezucha‘s “Let Him Go”, to continually crank emotion (or provide any, in a few scenes), it endlessly resorts to the contemporary film pastiche of multiple (and I mean, multiple) flashbacks on previous moments of joy and sorrow — all accompanied by a tinkering, melancholy piano. Can you say: CLICHE ALERT? If there weren’t for endless flashback to dying horse and beaming kids, many scenes wouldn’t have a life of their own, as the film proceeds on a thriller rudimentary path, a sort of “We-come-to-you!” “Straw Dogs.” But Bezucha’s direction and screenplay of a mother-in-law ready to go Rambo feels out of balance with all those tinkering pianos interrupting the action.

The flashbacks are a part of the film’s you-can-tell-it-must-have-been-a-moving-novella structure, where everything is motivated by stains of loss from the past, and all makes poetic psychological sense in its cause and effect to tie all the angst up. Barf. It’s packaged, cheap Psych 101. A subtext of loss runs subtly through the film like the Colorado River.

Performance-wise, Costner does not have to sweat tension on Oscar night. Now he kinda looks like your gruff uncle who just scowls grunts and, he currently acts like your uncle who scowls just grunts. Although I think his pulse soared above 90 for one line of dialog. More problematic is all-too authentic shading Diane Lane gives her pig-headed and slightly spoiled (horsewoman on a cops’s salary?) older protagonist who refuses to take “no” for an answer. Her icy mother-in-law character leeches away at her sympathy, never budging an inch, even as what should be serious concern starts to flow for the couple. Lanes resolve and anger — while obviously well earned – feels strangely selfish, hormone-induced, and fueled by self-help books. So steadfast was she in her bitchiness, that her character never thawed or seemed particularly bright, given the circumstances. So effective was she, that I started having my own flashbacks to working at Macy’s in 1990 and having to ring up impatient old women at Christmas. For me, this film should have be titled, “Let Him Go, Karen.” At one point in the film, I was wondered if the boozing, gun waving “Mama Grizzly” (yes, that’s in there) didn’t know a little more about having fun in life than Lane’s unsatisfied Karen — who’s best time seem to include whispering into dying horse’s ear. Who’s scary now?

The Change Has Come: With “Roma” Cuarón Re-writes Modern Cinema, Again

To make a long-winded review short: Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma” is a immaculate, wondrous filmmaking.  Cuarón’s “Roma” debuted in theaters this week, sharing screens with 25th anniversary showings of Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List,” and make note of possible synchronicity there, for both are among the most perfectly crafted modern film ever accomplished.  After “Children of Men’ and “Gravity,”  how could Cuarón possible pull more even cinematic innovation from his pocket? He does it by turning back the clock on his own work, swapping the Steadicam flow of “Children of Men” for quietly, meticulously composed panoramas of a upper class Mexican neighborhood in 1969 capture in the sublime beauty of black and white film.

The cinema is changing and I certainly hope those aspirational young directors at NYU and USC are watching. Cuarón and Iñárritu are rebelling the Hollywood school of living action figures, storyboarded like comics, artificially CGI’d into existence, as if spat from a 3D printer.

mise en scène
/ˌmēz ˌän ˈsen/
noun

1. the arrangement of scenery and stage properties in a play.
   • the setting or surroundings of an event or action.

Cuarón and Iñárritu rebellion is to wrest films from their surroundings with a slavish devotion to the fabric of reality. It’s neo-realism’s rebirth in the age of virtual reality,  with fluid cameras and high definition capturing every nuance WITHIN the frame, making Cuarón and Iñárritu stand in stark contrast to the digital  domain of modern Hollywood films. But in “Roma” Cuarón dials back on the steadicam flow of life, and uses a liesurely Antonio-like lens, forever moving in graceful pans that reveal the stunning tableux that Cuarón has carefully orchestrated into his frames. It’s a more traditional photographic technique, and he uses these 180-degree pans with such regularity at first that it feel indulgent, but as the film unfolds, the magic of Cuarón’s mise en scene with the frame expands and grows more brilliant — at times on the scale and complexity of the most audacious Kurosawa battle moments, they are so wonderfully choreographed. Set somewhere in 1969 (although a period piece, it’s barely discernible as such), the re-creation of a student riot is stunning directed, and other complex set pieces are equally masterfully staged. If there was anyone to pick up Kubrick’s “Napoleon” script and do it justice as a master visual director, it would be Cuarón.

“Roma” is about a young girl, a Mexican servant, whose devotion to the children she cares for and how they survive the decaying shelter of a wealthy Mexican household is a study in beatitude of selflessness. Saints come in many forms, and Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) is of that gentle flock long promised better things to come, but with of little hope of seeing them in this world. From a poor village of indigenous peoples of Mexico, a flat row of corrugated house, on streets of lumber-bridged mud puddle, Cleo and her sister are the au pairs and housekeeper to a distracted doctor and his stressed-but caring-wife. Her hands ever full of dishes, with always stairs to climb with wash, Cleo’s existence is a humble but contented one for she has nothing but the purest love for her young wards. While their admired father has acquired the barred windows of Mexico’s wealthy to shelter them, it’s Cleo who kisses their heads to wake them and the one who they tell they love. Hardly more than a child herself, Cleo’s love for the children is tragically unreturned in her own life, and she weathers her own tragedy with humble grace, Cuaron also knows saints come in many forms, and his character study of Cleo is indeed just that.

There is very little story to be told, so little that to reveal even the barest turns of fate would be to ruin artfully revealed disasters, so it should suffice to say, the wheel of life both ascends and descends for the family, with Cleo’s love helping the center hold. Yalitza’s quiet performance coupled with Cuarón’s intense, yet, invisible hand transforms her performance into one of those incredibly natural bits of portraiture that will forever make “Roma” shine as one of cinema’s bridge to great art.

A wonderful, perfect film, immaculately made. Cuarón takes his place among the greats with “Roma” (and Netflix as a bonfided studio). Cuarón’s direction of “Roma” has all the beauty, insight, and authenticity of Ingmar Bergman’s best works, the icongraphic imagery of Fellini, and directorial mise-en-scene of the great masters. But there are so many brilliants moments that are Cuaron’s alone that it may be time to speak in new tones of reverence.

Damien Chazelle’s Light Fantastic

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling are parked show biz kids Damien Chazelle’s musical  “La La Land.”

What does Damien Chazelle know about love?  His Oscar-nominated film “La La Land” is a musical love story, the tale of an aspiring actress and a struggling jazz musician whose steps cross and whose songs entwine in a well-crafted love ballad. But there’s something off note in “La La Land,” a horn player racing too quickly through the eighths. The bloom of love in “La La Land” has the passion of treadmill runners at a gym: It’s hard but its profits come quick. And that’s how Chazelle propels their romance, without a recovery period for anyone. Tripped off-balance by Chazelle’s desire to apostrophe the story, the couple’s frenzied tango has nary a step that doesn’t feel painted on the floor like Arthur Murray footprints. No lovely moments of cigarettes and coffee and French ennui; there are more auditions than kisses. It’s very musical, indeed: ‘Wham, bam, thank you mam’ and Emma Stone walks away like a woman missing a business meeting. For all the posters of Bergman and Davis on the wall, Chazelle doesn’t leave this Joan much room for passion. which is a shame. La La Land isn’t Paris. It a driven world where two artists ultimately are more in love with their golden dreams than they could ever be with each other. But that’s not a philosophical issue as Chazelle presents it — it’s more a scheduling problem. The land of Chazelle’s la-la is a Pacific Coast traffic jam and industry sex: Glamorous, beautiful, and keeping them back. And while the music swirls and stays in step for the most part, the film never manages to find the languidness of Miles Davis dipping into blues or jazz’s neighbor: Soul.

Subterranean blues

Inside Llewyn Davis

Show him the way to go home

I recently rewatched the Coen brothers’ 2013 film “Inside Llewyn Davis,” and realized that I like this film quite a bit. I think it may be the Coen’s most powerful drama. The story of a struggling folk singer during the coffeehouse  ’60s, “Inside Llewyn Davis”  uses New York’s East Village as the backdrop to a chorus of the Greek tragedy blues. Their showbiz story doesn’t trace the rise of a star; it’s a small dirge about a working stiff with a bit of talent, less money, and an ego driven by tireless desperation. How his hubris meets its demise bidding “bon voyage” to his dreams in the winter slush of a Chicago audition is an American Aristotelian awakening.  Llewyn’s tragedy is The Great One: He’s a hipster Willie Loman. The deepest cut of all in the land of opportunity and midnight cafe is the failed dream — the swing-and-a-miss at success. An anti-hero of Brooklyn, Davis isn’t particularly likeable. He has chutzbah for bravery and desperation for daring, and is pretty much tossed by the tempest of himself during his odyssey to retrieve a cat named “Ulysses.” Llewyn, frankly, is a bit of a bastard, but the magnitude of his fall – he gets hit hard, real hard – sees the redemption of his character: He’s broken but made sane again – a chance Willie Loman never got. Fans can expect the Cohen’s delightful humor, but the film’s real reward is it powerful transitioning from absurdist picaresque to American tragedy, portrayed through deft writing by the Coens worthy of Miller himself. “Inside Llewyn Davis” reaches deep, quietly revealing what has been tormenting Llewyn, and why he needed so desperately to succeed at his art.

“The Walk” Light as a feather

Director Robert Zemeckis’ delightful “The Walk,” the story of French street performer, Philippe Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), is a deftly crafted fairy tale.  It’s a charming story of rebellion and one man’s need to turn his life into art. At a pleasingly frantic pace — using a whimsical narration– the film is a dash through the life Petit and his mad quest to do a high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. And that walk. It’s superbly done. Instead of going for the sweat, Zemeckis turns the film dreamy and beautiful. It’s riveting as it transpires — passing in what feels like real time. It’s thrilling and existential in one big drop. And what a drop. Joseph Gordon-Levitt steps away from stone into the ether, and Zemeckis masterfully sustains that gut-wrenching step for a breathtaking 15 minutes. There’s stunning CGI work which shines in 3D IMAX, and “The Walk” was crafted as a showcase of that experience. You’ll swear you feel the clouds passing by your face. The preamble is equally well crafted as we lurch through the cloak-and-dagger “coup” of rigging the towers. Zemeckis spins the clockwork caper like a mad dream, which it surely was for Petite. Throughout, the film breezes through a perfectly chosen bouquet of incidents, and no one tosses those better than Zemeckis. He’s the master of the cinematic skit, every moment so exquisitely timed it lingers on as a smile even as you move onto the next scene. Zemeckis charmingly mythologizes Petite’s tale, turns it into a magical quest. Lively and entertaining, its a great film from modern comedy’s best director.

Retreading the Apocalypse — Mad Max: Fury Road

When the denizens of the apocalypse thunder up in their fire-belching steel monstrosities, raving and drooling, invading the scrap of wasted earth you’ve dug into for shelter from the wind, screaming insanities, and blasphemies, you’ll know who to thank: Dr. George Miller. Now, 70, the director, who one learns, indeed, finished his residency before fully succumbing to the dubious life of movie making, is one of the unacknowledged architects of the 21st Century, or at least it’s most grandiose obsession — the end of the society. Miller’s post-apocalypse vision has proven a cultural influence as seminal as George Romero’s “The Night of the Living Dead” and it’s unleashing of the zombie fixation that still flourishes without sign of a cure. Miller’s second film in the the Mad Max series,”The Road Warrior” — starring the then-untarnished and astonishing beauty of young Mel Gibson — was, in 1980, the excelerant to the let-it-all-burn frustrations of disenfranchised youths everywhere. Miller’s genius, beyond plumbing the arid roads of Aussie outback, ala Leone, as his revisionist Western wasteland torn asunder by monster trucks, was to populate his tale of society in its last stages of entropy with mutated punks and steroid-ripped glam rockers in glorious leather and chain-mail. A product of the energy-crisis era, he distilled the lifeblood of the humanity down to precious drops of high octane, fought and died for, to be fed reverently into “Grave Digger” hot rods in the dust, sustaining and taking life, spewing flame like pyres to Moloch. Miller’s was a wholly original vision — a ripping post-apolcalyptic yarn that tapped into Sex Pistol’s anarchy and stoked mohawked youth’s ambitions to be the last-rockers-on-earth. As a seer of things to come, time has revealed the acuity of Miller’s dysto-vision as matched only by steampunk grandaddy H.G. Welles and techno-paranoia of Orwell. Today’s apocalpyse fashionistas, pierced, tribally tattooed and encyclopedicially-versed in automatic weapons from their endless practice at survivalist video games, are the spawn of good Dr. Miller’s vision. And when the power plants grind to a halt and the mayhem begins, he may even be cursed for his mad tetralogy of the road being the source a self-fulling prophesy.

Oh yes, and this is the best one yet.

MORE TO COME

On a Bicycle Built for Deus? “Ex Machina’s” empty lecture

Little Gear Lost: “Ex Machina”

There are a lot of human beings out there betting our species isn’t long for the top of the pyramid on this planet and, oddly, they’re the hopeful ones.

There was a time when the future looked quite bright from behind the black shades of ‘sixties Ray Bans. Trips to the moon were actually taking place instead of being debunked on the internet. And in the sci-fi classic, “The Tenth Victim,” Ursula Andress, writhing in a miniskirt to the abstract jazz of Piero Piccioni, was a languid promise that even sex in the future might be better — at least much more interesting.

Then suddenly along came HAL9000 — the archly wheedling, we-hope-you-enjoy-your-trip steward  of “2001: A Space Odyssey” — and dark-minded Stanley Kubrick prophesied that maybe trekking in all those gleaming spaceships we adored might just prove as dull as a cross-country Greyhound excursion, and that those data-spewing Univacs may not have in mind handing over the Meaning of Life, but delivering the final blow to ours.

Maybe that’s when we should have started pulling the plugs.

But then a generation or two down the road fell hopeless and inextricably in love with technology. And that is why, despite the warnings of a few somewhat tech-savvy folk like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, the near-presence of the Singularity — the moment when machines finally step up to the plate as the next-big thing — is anticipated by some like the arrival of a new iPhone, rather than the sudden devaluation of organic life. In their eyes there will be wonders like virtual worlds to explore and, even better, virtual girls.

Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe the Singularity will be cool. Awesome, even.

Or maybe they haven’t had their HAL moment yet.

So I was anxious to see “Ex Machina” as soon as the trailer made it’s appearance on the Web. It seemed a dark film. Foreboding. The stuff of heady sci-fi. Would it deliver the kind of punch to the groin that the great cautionary tales of the past like “Colossus: The Forbin Project,” “1984,” “Metropolis,”  “The Andromeda Strain,” and “2001” mustered?

The answer, sadly, is no.

This is director Alex Garland’s first film and “Ex Machina” suffers from his inexperience behind the camera. There’s a large body of film making that borrows from television advertising and is littered with visual and aural cliches. There’s a generic backdrop of lightly plucked acoustic music, and dreamily edited, bokeh-laden photography that screams hip. Garland indulges in this style so much that, stylistically, it feels like a thousand other bits of commercial celluloid out there in the last five years.

At odds with these hipster trappings is the rather brutal material Garland has penned. And that’s my main problem with “Ex Machina” – its over-fascination with the psycho-sexual subtext of the story. For a film that promises a glimpse of the future, it’s more concerned with the same old failings that man (and women) are err to as hapless slaves to sex.

There’s always been a kind of thoughtfulness and restraint that accompanies classic science fiction. It’s both clinical as a white lab coat and stodgily respectable as a tweed-fitted professor – asking that you listen intently to the theories being sermonized.  I’ll admit I was anxious to sign up for the lecture “Ex Machina” promised, as it dangled the fascinating subject of AI: the stuff of Golden Age dreams and wonder.

But, alas, as the film rolled, the podium stood empty. In place of learned professor someone had rolled up a TV monitor and tired Betamax machine, apparently supplied with the wrong cassette, paper bagged and quietly pulled from beneath a counter. As “Ex Machina”  played on, my heart sank as I realized the tale was to be less Asimov and more servo-driven de Sade. Despite occasional snippets of debate on what it means to be human, “Ex Machina’s” story is little more than damsel-with-pneumatic-limbs in distress melodrama. It’s more akin to a creaky gothic horror story than a glimpse into the future.  The transcendence of artificial intelligence and it’s implications are hardly touched upon, instead “Ex Machina” focuses on a story as hoary as a Victorian bodice ripper.

A slightly mad (and hungover) genius programmer with a Net tycoon’s ten-figure-bank account (Oscar Isaac reprising his tough-kid-from-Brooklyn persona from “Inside Llewyn Davis“) has secluded himself on an impossibly large piece of real estate and a surprisingly claustrophobic piece of architecture: despite a presumed love of the great outdoors. In his private bunker, Isaac has created a Bluebeard’s boudoir of female automatons that he keeps closeted while he pursues, presumably, the perfect artificial companion. The young visitor who knocks innocently at the imposing door of his castle like a naive traveler from a Poe tale, (Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson, mimicking the boyish lilt of Matthew Modine) finds himself inexplicably drawn to Ava, an eerie, yet comely young automaton (Icelandic waif Alicia Vikander), who may or may not be Isaac’s victim. The lord of the castle tasks this young traveler with determining if his creation is a success, worthy of being labeled human, while secretly manipulating him to fall in love with her – in a way, it’s almost like the set up to a dirty joke. And there is a certain tawdriness that permeates this story of a sweet-faced android held prisoner by her Google-age Frankenstein.

Gleeson’s and Vikander’s behind-glass-walls relationship – the centerpiece of the film – is half-Times Square peep show, half speed dating. For a young programmer with an interest in logic, Gleeson soon abandons his, going instantly gaga for The Bride. Charged with administering a test of intelligence, Gleeson fails his own miserably. Even with the knowledge that she’s more Linux than Ligeia, he lets her charms fool him into thinking what she needs is a white knight and not a hard restart.  Instead of probing the workings of Vicander’s mind, he spends the time talking to her like they’re in their first slow dance at the high school prom. And speaking of dancing,  one of the film’s most remarked-on scenes is an impromptu, perfectly synched disco number between Isaacs and a lithe Asian android he’s put on mute. While undeniably fun, that fact that it’s about the only scene to raise”Ex Machina” out of its numbness, portends badly of the film having a pulse less real than its heroine. And as to the threat of the Singularity, I’m still not certain it ever occurs. Vikander never shows more than hamster smarts in her single-tasked existence to escape, and in some ways it’s more Isaac’s brutishness than Vikander’s intelligence that spurs her hapless hero into action. Like a Albee’s would-be lothario ensnared by the unhappy couple, George and Martha, they’ve both worked-over his emotions for their game. Has machine triumphed over man? Or was everyone just grinding gears?

Garland’s locked-in-a-dungeon script, coupled with a plentiful tableaux of supple artificial flesh, eventually feels less and less like a exploration of the new millenium’s scariest possibility than a peek into a folder of inappropriate Victoriana. That’s why as a science fiction purist, I felt myself increasingly pulling away from “Ex Machina.”  The mad doctor’s growing sadism toward his dolls makes the film feel increasingly like “Fifty Shades of Grey”written for the IT department.

The actors are all fine (especially Vikander, whose performance carries the film) but despite being a tale of the evolution of consciousness, they’re not given much of transcendence to work with as real beings. Gleeson’s direction often seem to runaway from him. Temper’s flair out of proportion over spilled wine and nuanced emotions run too high. Actually, one of the scariest parts of the movie is Gleeson’s cowering, nice American-boy performance. While robot intelligence may be on the rise, Gleeson perfectly captures the testosterone stultified young male, and his transformation into a gender-neutral life form. Good thing the mad scientist didn’t create a kitty; Gleeson would have lost it five minutes into the film.

So will “Ex Machina” be the film that challenges a generation over the error of its ways in so blindly falling for technology? Unfortunately not. No one is going to be leaving the theater desperately texting: “Hey, dude, turn off your freaking computer now!”

Which is a shame, because that’s the stuff of great sci-fi.

Black Holes and Revelations: Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar”

There is nothing so grand as to speculate on than the infinite. In an infinite cosmos, everything falls within the realm of possibility, and that may be why science fiction is so enduring as an art form – it promises revelation. Science’s unfolding of the universe, freed from the morass of religious archetype, is the saga of modern spirituality that plays out in science fiction. Yet, there has always remained a quaint cautionary aspect to science fiction. Storytellers and audiences remain suckers for parable. As much as we crave escape into the unknown, we crave guidance from above. Christopher Nolan’s epic sci-fi film, “Interstellar,” explores the foibles of seeking either.

“Interstellar” is richly steeped in the classicism of science fiction, which is surprisingly hermetic as a genre. More often than not, science fiction stories are tales of apocalypse or transcendence, rocket-wreathed journeys of harrowing adventure. And like other sci-fi films before it, “Interstellar” walks familiar scorched earth. It is a cautionary tale, a vision of global apocalypse, in addition to being a Homeric journey of discovery. Yet “Interstellar” instantly defines itself as one of the landmarks of the genre. Transcendent and harrowing, it is probably the finest science fiction film produced in decades. What’s miraculous is how fresh Nolan makes his classically crafted science fiction feel, shaping it with absolute modernity. “Interstellar” is Nolan’s best film to date and most certainly among the most beautiful science fiction films ever made.

The screenplay, written by Nolan and his brother, Johnathan, is unabashedly intelligent. Not since Paddy Chayefsky’s “Altered States” has such high-functioning dialogue been chewed onscreen by geeks. And while its constructed as neatly as a pyramid, the layers of the story might seem confusing to some unwilling to invest in the journey. But for those who venture into “Interstellar” seeking revelation, the threads of the tale weave themselves deliciously back together by its conclusion.

Even as it fulfills the sci-fi purist’s quest for substance,”Interstellar” is also a grandly orchestrated piece of popular entertainment, driven by family drama, suspense, and moments of blazing action. It’s a complex film, ambitious in its artistry, yet a film that mainstream audiences won’t feel put off by. Clocking in at nearly three hours in length, “Interstellar” is also a marathon of a movie. It’s a movie for the bingeing generation. Yet its length is befitting the ambitions of its story and the stately verisimilitude of Nolan’s mise-en-scène.

“Interstellar” is set in the not-so-far away future when a dust storm-whipped Earth teeters on extinction. It’s not greenhouse gases or oil reserves that have done in mankind, but a vegetative blight starving out nations and throwing the planet’s O2 levels into chaos. Nolan wisely does little finger-pointing (Monsanto, anyone?) or proselytizing in his story. It suffices to say that the world is quickly going out with a whimper, not a bang.

In Nolan’s hands, the quiet apocalypse is revealed with the poignancy of a Dorthea Lange photograph. There are no huge scenes of turmoil or writhing, starving masses. Nolan paints his tale deftly, working like a watercolorist in suggestive strokes to create a picture of what has transpired: a line of dialogue referencing the dismantling of world’s armies; a parent-teacher conference lamenting dwindling resources. In most people’s lives, outside disasters are barely a topic of conversation, while the inner turmoil of family life is their focal point. And that’s how Nolan spins his epic, holding steadfastly to the personal intimacy at its core. It’s a smart decision by Nolan that keeps “Interstellar” grounded, despite an aspiration to opening a door on the cosmos.

The film opens with a series of taped “historical” interviews delivered by septuagenarians looking back on the last days of life on earth. The device sets up a tone of weighty realism that Nolan works hard to maintain throughout the film. Of particular note is Nolan’s handling of his space scenes. The trend in contemporary films, where the wonders of CGI are able to render incredibly complex worlds, has been to wow audiences with size and scope. Here, Nolan gives us close, tight shots of his ships, like the fleeting images of separating stages captured by onboard cameras in early NASA missions. It’s a clever, convention-shedding technique that, again, keeps the film feeling real. On the other hand, there are scenes of such dazzling spectacle and kinetically-charged action that you will be gasping as if the air in your space suit has run out.

The big moments of planetary splendor even outshine the seminal work Kubrick did in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Jaw dropping images of tumbling spacecraft spinning through the rings of Saturn, helpless and dwarfed by the giant denizens of our solar system, are breath-taking. Those seeking a visual trip to space won’t be disappointed: planetary splendor is on plentiful display. And the special effects depicting where no man has gone before — through the mystery of worm holes and black holes — coupled with Han Zimmer’s blistering score that nearly renders you unconscious at times, are cosmic thrill rides that you won’t soon forget.

The story’s hero, Cooper, a former test pilot, lives in a plain state where dust storms regularly obliterate the landscape. Instead of turning these storms into set pieces for frenzied action, Nolan has his townspeople simply flick on their windshield wipers and continue gamely through these storms of biblical proportion. It’s an interesting choice that plays against the cliches of the action genre — a reasoned response — exemplifying the well-thought nature of Nolan’s creation. A lesser director would have responded with a melodramatic Hollywood reflex.

Cooper has shed his wings to become what a world with a shriveling food supply now needs most — farmers. Matthew McConaughey gives a terrifically layered performance in the role, embodying it physically and spiritually. His sun-baked, sinewy frame suggests the earth’s desperation, and his down-on-the-farm accent captures that nonchalant drawl heard so frequently over an airplane’s cabin speaker. But Cooper is an amalgam — half devoted scientist; half stick-and-rudder man — which makes his transition from tractor driver to navigator of black holes believeable. McConaughey projects just the right inner intensity as a former pilot who is still haunted by the call of the sky. Like John Wayne in “The Searchers,” he is a spiritual wanderer unable to settle down quietly on a homestead. He quietly rejects the government’s call to abandon man’s loftier ambitions of exploration and embrace agrarian simplification. When he is told at a school meeting that his son’s future will never rise beyond one of tilling the earth, McConaughey’s inner conflict while relaying the news to his son is heartbreaking.

And like a hero fated to action, the call does come for Cooper to return to the skies. He is asked to pilot an interstellar spacecraft in search of humanity’s new home. The decision is an agonizing, if a likely pre-ordained, one for the devoted father substituting as both parents. And the situation is worsened by his daughter’s (Mackenzie Foy of the “Twilight” series) refusal to forgive his abruptly leaving the family. Their abbreviated relationship provides a core to the story that is painful yet essential in ways to be revealed.

It is here that Nolan lays down his particle physics and turns to his metaphysics in a storyline that suggests the greatest self-perpetuating force in the universe is our spiritual bond to each other. Unlike Kubrick’s orgasmic Nietzschean rendezvous at the finale of “2001” with the supreme being, Nolan turns to Jung’s animus and anima, the masculine and feminine archetypes of the subconscious mind, for his own unifying theory.  Kubrick has always been accused of being an icy thinker, but it’s here that Nolan proves himself to be the man of science, at least psychology. And Cooper’s voyage to the edge of a black hole, where time bends like a willow front, is cleverly played out in context of the chasm of separation between father and daughter. Their love and loss transmitted over the years in melancholy, one-sided electronic messages, is perhaps another parable for our times.

Nolan has always loved playing with the structure of his films, framing them like Chinese puzzles and “Interstellar” is no different. But he does it here with such subtlety and well-defined logic that there’s no overly clever feel to his devicing in “Interstellar” — the story feels natural and inevitable and works perfectly within the genre of science fiction. Cooper and his daughter’s relationship neatly follows Nolan’s themes of mobieus strip we sometimes walk though life.

“Interstellar” is in the vein of the “Golden Age” stories of science fiction, what has been called “hard science fiction.” Those works include the visions of authors like Asimov, Clarke, Silverberg, Pohl and the countless other practitioners who took scientific accuracy as the cornerstone of their works. In their stories, the astounding meets reality on a playing field of fantasy; but a playing field effectively sowed by science. I was not a fan of Nolan’s “Inception” because I thought it failed at a key tenant of science fiction: believability. The science needed to justify my leap of faith its cosmos wasn’t there. But “Interstellar,” despite voyaging near the edge of incredulousness, works. Nolan remains true to the rules, and he does so with with an artistry seldom seen outside the masters of the genre.

Further establishing that Nolan set out work within the classicism of the genre is the presence of a staple of the science fiction in “Interstellar”: the robot. That Nolan would write in a part for a trusty mechanical friend (or foe, depending on the film), warmed the cockles of my heart. And his creation, TARS, is a worthy and memorable addition to the canon of great screen automatons, alongside Robby, HAL9000 (though some would quibble HAL didn’t get around much), Andrew (Bicentennial Man), AMEE (Red Plant Mars) and R2D2. His transformation from a walking ATM into a machine of war during a rescue mission will astound you.

If, like myself, you almost instinctually sense the influence of other films, the devoted science fiction fan may pick up on the cosmic vibe of a few classics while watching “Interstellar.” Yet, they are only the faintest glimmer here and there, and they are brilliantly distilled. But that’s almost to be expected in a genre as closely structured as science fiction. And there is no need to go hunting for inspirations here, because “Interstellar” is inspiring on it’s own. It’s an accomplishment by a master filmmaker who has challenged himself to draw between the lines after expanding those boundaries so dramatically earlier in his career.

Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” is superb entertainment and a revelation about how good a much-loved genre can be in the hands of a master.

Hot Property VS. a Cool Head: David Fincher’s “Gone Girl”

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ben afflect, david fincher, film review, Gillian Flynn, gone girl review, gone grl, movie review

Like blood for sharks: “Gone Girl” rakes the headlines of Fox News.

David Fincher’s new film “Gone Girl” is a faithful adaptation of the best-selling novel by Gillian Flynn, which earned the former Entertainment Weekly writer almost universal kudos for her smartly crafted thriller. Luckily for Flynn, the screenplay (which she adapted herself) wound up in the capable hands of director Fincher, who gives “Gone Girl” the same exacting treatment as his other recent films. I say luckily, because in the hands of a lesser director, “Gone Girl” could easily have come off as pandering as the Fox News sensationalism it employs as a target of mockery.

Even as “Gone Girl” poked fun at the American public’s tabloid tastes, the novel’s success hinged on delivering exactly the same kind of rewards as those “Kidnapped Coed” headlines the news media so dearly loves: Sex, shock, betrayal!  However cleverly the titillations were clothed in the book behind spunky post-modern prose, stripped down as a film, “Gone Girl” could have unraveled into the kind of potboiler that comes and goes without leaving much of an imprint beyond the smiles on a few studio accountants’ faces.

That is why putting a cool operator like David Fincher, with his dissection-lab sense of aesthetics, at the helm of the movie was either a stroke of genius or tremendous luck; I can think of no other working director who could have more nimbly prevented “Gone Girl” from becoming a trashy film version of a pseudo-trashy book (The novel, perhaps tellingly, battled it out for supremacy on the New York Times best-seller list with “50 Shades of Gray”).

I hardly want to delve into the plot of “Gone Girl” as the slightest giveaway will have filmgoers hurling “spoiler” epithets in my direction. In a nutshell, when unemployed writer Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck, looking suitably booze-bloated for the role) returns home to find his beautiful ice queen of a wife, Amy, missing (Rosamund Pike in an appropriately pitched performance), a media feeding frenzy ensues. Headed by a Fox News-Nancy Grace caricature (Missi Pyle), the war tom-toms soon lead everyone to suspect Nick as his wife’s slayer. But his devoted twin sister (Carrie Coon) and his thousand-dollar-suited lawyer (stubble-coiffed Tyler Perry) see otherwise — and soon the audience does, as well.

The film’s advertising touts the story as an examination of the deception that lies behind everyday marriage when, in fact, it feels more like what lies behind the doors of the C.S.I writers’ room. Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage” it is not. Hardly subtle, it is pleasingly tabloid, but luckily that is where Fincher stepped in.

Fincher is the new Truman Capote of the cinema, an artist who has perfected a balance of blending truth and fiction so seamlessly that something entirely new is born of the merger. What Capote called his “non-fiction novel,” Fincher has reversed, creating something along the lines of “non-dramatic movies.” That’s not to say Fincher makes dull films, far from it. But for all their brilliance, there is nothing overtly theatrical about Fincher’s recent films.

Dispensing with showy direction, he never uses his tools to emotionalize material and wrest a response out of the audience. Instead, his films tick neatly and precisely along as the Swiss chapter of Eurorail, with nearly the same dramatic weight being given to moments of epiphany as to moments of minutiae. He’s like a bastard child of Hollywood and Lar Von Triers’ Dogme 95 — a group of aesthete Danish filmmakers who have vowed to put aside special effects and melodramatic flourishes in the pursuit of a purer cinema. Unlike the Dogme 95 adherents, Fincher moves his camera and actors with studio perfectionism (and cuts equally immaculately), but tone of his films embrace the kind of kind naturalism that the restrained Danes admire.

Fincher never over-varnishes a scene with emotion, never lingers on a moment longer than is required. He’s so deft as a director that he’s  nearly invisible, moving through commercial thrillers like “Zodiac” as subtly as a documentarian. In comparison to flamboyant stylists like Wes (or Paul Thomas) Anderson and hyper-visualists like Kubrick, Fincher is a Shaker-furniture maker — keeping his films religiously simple, but honing them with such master-craftsman precision that he makes even a straight line feels exquisitely wrought.

One gets the sense that Fincher is first and foremost concerned with the structure of his films. He is superb at the logic of storytelling which, in filmmaking, generally means rigidly adhering to a script. (“Gone Girl” is being called Fincher’s “Hitchcock” film, and Hitchcock was notably famous for the vast amount of time he spent mapping out his scripts and storyboards with wife Alma Reville; so much so that the shooting process itself was almost perfunctory).

That may explain why Fincher’s films come off so intelligently on the screen: Fincher is a craftsman of story, rather than hyperbolic visuals. And that’s likely the reason why a garish tale like “Gone Girl” works so well under his control. “Gone Girl” was praised as a novel for rising above its potboiler storyline through clever writing, but normally there’s no hiding behind prose at the cinema. Take, for instance, Faulkner’s books adapted for Hollywood. With the poetry of their corn-whiskey patois stripped away, classics like “The Sound and the Fury” felt like little more than steamy southern gothics.

Fincher’s literary rendering of “Gone Girl” manages to capture the smarty-pants tone of Flynn’s novel which is vital, because without that tone the guilty pleasures of plot twists and slain lovers meant to satisfy the thriller-reading public would have sunk the film.  Consequently, “Gone Girl” is probably one of the luckiest collaborations to come to the screen in a long time, especially for  Flynn, whose tale was spared combustion under the xenon arc lights by Fincher’s cool-headed read. There’s no need to worry about Fincher going up in flames, because it’s always those thoughtful craftsmen who labor well into their golden years, and just keep getting better at it.