Tag: review

MOVIE REVIEW: Interstellar

In Interstellar, reading the dust, literally, Coop makes a startling discovery and eventually flies off into a mysterious rip in the space-time continuum.

interstellarNow THAT’S how I like to see a movie: knowing almost nothing. I’d heard Interstellar had gotten some decent reviews and that it ran almost three hours (actually 166 minutes).

In Albany, it was playing both at the Spectrum, only at noon, and at my neighborhood Madison Theatre, at 3, 6 and 9:35 p.m., on the last Tuesday of 2014. If you knew my spouse, you’d know the latter was totally off the table, even though she didn’t have to work the next day.

The Madison at 6 it is. They show no previews, so the patrons haven’t figured out that when the overlay comes on that says the title, it’s time to be quiet.

There’s Matthew Matthew McConaughey playing Coop, a farmer in a near-future United States which is about to experience some nasty combination of the Ireland potato famine of the 1840s, as crop after crop fails; and the Oklahoma Dust Bowl of the 1930s, with precautions against the dust a way of life.

Coop is widowed with a couple kids, easy-going 15-year-old Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and Murph (Mackenzie Foy), an intense, intelligent 10-year-old girl. The kids have limited prospects, limited dreams in the new economy, epitomized by one sentence from Coop: “We used to look up to the sky and wonder about our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

In the early part of the film, the most chilling dialogue takes place between Coop and a pair of “educators” (David Oyelowo, Collette Wolfe) who have criticized Coop for letting Murph read unauthorized books rather than the revisionist history.

Reading the dust, literally, Coop makes a startling discovery, after which he leaves his two kids in the care of his father-in-law (John Lithgow) and eventually flies off into a mysterious rip in the space-time continuum with Brand (Anne Hathaway) – daughter of a noted scientist (Michael Caine) – and with others in a desperate effort to save the earth’s inhabitants.

It goes on like that, space travel, with much talk about time and gravity and how it affects all the other dimensions, and some occasional action, both in space and on the home front.

Interstellar also stars Casey Affleck, Matt Damon, and a whole lot of other folks, with essentially a cameo by Ellen Burstyn.

Then I realized I have no idea how to review this movie, at least without a lot of spoilers. So I am going to cheat and paste reviewers’ observations:

*As a singular movie-watching opportunity, it’s undoubtedly worthwhile. – Christy Lemire (negative review)

*Having set out to be a journey into what can hardly be depicted at all, Interstellar must find oblique ways of suggesting further imperceptible dimensions of the real. It is worth the journey to see what [director and co-writer Christopher] Nolan has constructed as a model of the unknowable. – Geoffrey O’Brien (positive review)

*A combination of spectacular special effects, marginal physics, and grindingly slow treacle. – Ron Wilkinson (positive review)

*Interstellar may be a preposterous epic, but it is an epic nonetheless. – Christopher Orr (positive review)

These are all accurate assessments of my feelings. I will say that Jessica Chastain as the grown-up Murph is very good. I thought the third hour was better paced, and more interesting, than the second, which could have used a 10-minute edit.

Bottom line: I’m glad I saw it, I wouldn’t watch it again, and I’m unsure whether to recommend it. The Wife liked it much less than I, but she was more confused by the science, or pseudo-science, while I didn’t worry greatly about the details.

I do think this will look worse on home video because the viewer will quite possibly get bored and give up on it.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Theory of Everything

One of the questions the film The Theory of Everything did NOT address was how has Stephen Hawking lived to 70 with ALS?

theoryofeverythingWhen I heard the buzz about the movie The Theory of Everything, I expected that the movie-making would be less conventional. But it’s just a standard romantic biopic of boy meets girl/boy and girl fall in love/boy discovers he has ALS and has two years to live/boy and girl get married anyway/they live happily ever after (for a while).

The “boy” is astrophysicist Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne from the movie Les Misérables), who will eventually become one of the most famous scientists in the world, and author of the bestseller A Brief History of Time. The “girl” is fellow Cambridge student Jane Wilde (Felicity Jones), an unlikely pair.

Jane: So, I take it you’ve never been to church?
Stephen: Once upon a time.
Jane: Tempted to convert?
Stephen: I have a slight problem with the celestial dictatorship premise.

Great physical transformations have taken place so often in film that I think this one by Redmayne may be underrated. Yet I think the greater evolution takes place with Jones, who, over a thirty-year period, convinces the viewer of the joys and tribulations of living and dealing with someone so physically limited, yet so intellectually stimulating.

Perhaps the story, based on Jane’s memoir Travelling to Infinity, feels a tad formulaic, though occasionally quite funny. But the acting, including Charlie Cox, Maxine Peake, and Simon McBurney, who I was unfamiliar with, and David Thewlis and Emily Watson, who I’ve watched for years, is solid.

The Wife and I were glad we saw it, as usual, at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany.

One of the questions the film did NOT address was How Has Stephen Hawking Lived to 70 with ALS?

In the year-in-review stories, it’s fascinating how the ALS ice bucket challenge became a viral storm.

MOVIE REVIEW: Whiplash

Whiplash is a movie less about jazz than the application of perfection that the instructor was apparently seeking.

Whiplash-5547.cr2Sometimes, what movie The Wife and I end up seeing depends on circumstances. The weekend before Christmas, I’m looking at the movies playing at The Spectrum Theatre in Albany that was departing on Christmas Eve, and the one that got the most critical buzz was Whiplash. Specifically, J.K. Simmons, who I know from the Tobey Maguire movie version of Spider-Man, as Assistant Chief Pope from the TV show The Closer, and, oddly, from a series of commercials for Farmers Insurance. He’s already won the Best Supporting Actor nod from the New York Film Critics Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics Association and is nominated for a Golden Globe, as is the movie itself.

Whiplash stars Miles Teller, who I remember favorably from The Spectacular Now in 2013. Here he plays Andrew Neiman, a 19-year-old jazz drummer, who wants to next Buddy Rich. He is accepted into the legendary New York City music school, the Shaffer Conservatory. Andrew successfully auditions to become the new drum alternate for notorious Shaffer conductor Terence Fletcher (Simmons).

Then the “fun” begins. While practicing the Hank Levy song “Whiplash”, Fletcher makes Andrew’s life difficult, not that he has singled him out. And that’s all I’ll say about that.

The movie costars Melissa Benoist (Marley from the TV show Glee) as Andrew’s neglected girlfriend and Paul Reiser (TV’s Mad About You) as his supportive dad. The film was written and directed by Damien Chazelle, who I had never heard of.

We watched a pair of intense performances. At the point about 2/3s of the way through, the movie seemed to let up a bit, but the drama returns and runs to the end. This is a movie less about jazz than the application of perfection that Fletcher was apparently seeking; I’ve seen it, and you have too in other endeavors. In fact, the Wife and I found several examples of, “Boy, do I know THAT feeling.” The music is quite good, but it is secondary to the narrative.

When I was in high school, we had some music competitions. Someone said that drum solos are boring unless they’re not. Whiplash is an inspired drum solo.

MOVIE REVIEW: Force Majeure

American audiences don’t much like movies with subtitles.

force-majeure-poster-640x400The problem with describing the Swedish film Force Majeure as a comedy, or even as a dark comedy, which I’ve now read a few times, is that one may look for the humor early on, and that would be a mistake. It looks like the portrait of a perfect bourgeois family, a pretty mom, and nice-looking dad, and their attractive children, a girl, and a boy, on a ski vacation in Switzerland at a chichi resort. Pretty mundane, even boring.

Then the avalanche comes, which, not much of a spoiler, they all survive. Physically, that is. But what goes on emotionally in the relationships among the “perfect” nuclear family, and those with whom they interact is what’s interesting.

I suspected, even before looking up the Rotten Tomatoes scores, that it’d be a movie liked more by critics, 93% positive at last glance at Rotten Tomatoes, than by the general public. 76% positive. One either buys the basic conceit of the narrative, or one does not. It’s also the case that American audiences don’t much like movies with subtitles, though some of the film is in English; it didn’t bother me.

The Wife and I liked it quite a bit when we saw it at The Spectrum in Albany on a recent Sunday afternoon, In particular, the stark use of silence, and the ambiguous and multiple endings, were intriguing. There’s one brief moment when I actually ducked in my chair, and it was NOT the avalanche scene.

I just figured this out: the choice of the dominant music was part of the joke!

MOVIE REVIEW: Birdman

Birdman is “a backstage drama, an absurdist comedy, a quasi-autobiographical revelation.”

birdmanWay back on Thanksgiving weekend, I saw Birdman, or The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance at the Spectrum in Albany. I really admired what they were trying to do, this black comedy about an actor named Riggan (Michael Keaton) who had become rich and famous for playing a comic book superhero, the title reference.

Now he wants to write, produce, direct and star in a play on Broadway. However, he finds himself in conflict with some of the other actors, a nasty Broadway critic, and mostly, with himself.

The scene where Riggan is walking through Times Square nearly naked (seen in part in the trailer) is quite funny, as is the superhero action sequence (likewise teased in the trailer). This is great work by Michael Keaton, who, of course, played Batman in the movies then walked away from the role.

I think the movie says some important things about celebrity, trying to be true to one’s artistic vision, and how difficult the acting profession can be on family life. The actors are all fine, including Andrea Riseborough, Naomi Watts and especially Edward Norton as his fellow thespians; Zach Galifianakis as the guy trying to keep the production together; Lindsay Duncan as the steely critic; Amy Ryan as Riggan’s ex-wife; and Emma Stone as his very moody daughter.

Eric Melin wrote, correctly, in Scene-Stealers.com: “It’s a lot of things-a backstage drama, an absurdist comedy, a quasi-autobiographical revelation, a self-aware jab at blockbusters, a wannabe social-media age satire, and a piece of technically superior magical realism-but one thing it isn’t, is subtle.”

It has reviewed really well – 94% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, last I checked. Yet as I walked out of the theater, I saw someone I knew, who had seen the same showing of the film. He asked if I liked the film, and I said, “I’m still working on that.” He replied, “I didn’t like it.”

A couple of weeks later, I STILL don’t know that I liked it as much as admired it. Perhaps the too-positive buzz raised my expectations too high. Maybe the quirky direction of Alejandro González Iñárritu, who also co-wrote the screenplay was at times too distracting. Or maybe, just maybe, I just wasn’t in the mood for that particular movie at that particular time; it happens.

Ramblin' with Roger
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