Interstellar (4/5 Stars)

Whatever can happen, will happen.

Young Murphy Cooper (Mackenzie Foy) asks her father (Matthew McConaughey) why she was named after something bad. Her father replies that Murphy’s Law is not necessarily pessimistic. All it means is that (given enough time) anything that can happen will happen. The pessimistic side of this looks at chaotic unforgiving nature and all the ways it can and will disrupt the best plans of mice and men. But look at it in another light. For instance, if you believed that humans could adapt to anything, well then, given enough time our species should be able to solve any problem that the universe throws at it. Of course, the supposition that must be true is that human beings actually could someday evolve to be capable of anything, even going so far as to say master space and time. That is a wildly optimistic notion and it is surprising to come from writer Jonathan Nolan and director Christopher Nolan particularly since their non-Batman movies have been great explorations of self-delusion (memory in Memento, magic in The Prestige, dreams in Inception). But here it is, and it is a good thing the Nolan’s are in charge of this project because I’m not sure anybody else could have made it. It is perhaps the most expensive and epic intellectual exercise since Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and only the Nolan’s have the box office clout to finance a movie like this. Try to see it in the theater because it is not going make any sense on a small screen.

The movie starts with humans on Earth confronted with the extinction of their species. It takes place about fifty years from now. Old Man Cooper (played by John Lithgow) talks of how when he was a kid it seemed like everyday something new would be invented. Imagine that, six billion people all wanting it all at the same time. But something happened in nature. There is this dust storm blight that kills vegetation. The only crop that can grow now is corn. The blight feeds on all the Nitrogen in the atmosphere and every year it creates more Nitrogen, which only makes the blight even stronger. Population has dropped. Technology has stuttered. Pretty soon humanity won’t even be able to grow corn and then everyone will die.

The last ditch effort of humanity is a secret NASA mission led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) to send a spaceship through a wormhole that has just been discovered near Saturn to a distant galaxy where hopefully there is another planet that can sustain human life. Matthew McConaughey, a retired pilot, is chosen for the job. So is Professor Brand’s daughter, Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway), two other guys, and a couple of sentient robots named TARS and KASE. TARS has a humor setting in his A.I. and provides comic relief.

It is a very long journey and one of the most interesting conceits of this story is its portrayal of Einstein’s theory of relativity. One facet of this theory is that as one approaches the speed of light, the slower time goes for the mover. Another is that proximity to a black hole also slows down time for the mover. At one point in the movie a trip to a planet near a black hole that takes merely hours takes many years on Earth. And suddenly Murph Cooper is no longer played by the ten-year-old Mackenzie Foy but by the thirty-something Jessica Chastain. (It should be noted how remarkably similar Mackenzie and Jessica look like each other). I saw a great meme with a picture of Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar that harked back to his first movie, Dazed and Confused, where he uttered the memorable line, “You know what I like about high school girls. Each year I get older but they stay the same age.” Of course this meme changed it a little bit. Now it reads, “You know what I like about my children. Each year they get older, but I stay the same age.”

Then there is a cameo by a well-known actor that I hesitate the mention because none of the advertisment material apparently wanted me to know about before he shows up quite unexpectedly. It is a great turn by that unnamed person. Matthew McConaughey continues his bewildering streak of very good movies. The same can be said for Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain. And of course, it looks very impressive, the Black Hole and Wormhole especially. 

I don’t think I can say anymore without ruining some of the surprises. It is worth seeing, that is all. 

Rosewater (4/5 Stars)

The hook of this story was all so irresistible. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the many award winning fake news show on Comedy Central, sent a correspondent named Jason Jones to Iran on the even of the 2009 Iranian elections. While there he interviewed a British-Iranian journalist named Maziar Bahari who tried to convince Jason, comedically dressed as a spy, that Iranians were not evil and that Americans and Iranians had plenty in common. I remember seeing that segment in 2009. And then shit went down in Iran. Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, rigged the elections and the following street protests went viral. Several months later we find out that Maziar Bahari was jailed without due process after the elections. He was accused of being a spy and provoking civil disorder through the Western media. What was some of the evidence against him? Well, the Daily Show segment that showed him talking to Jason Jones dressed up as a spy. Maziar wrote a book about it titled, “Then They Came for Me.” Jon Stewart offered to help to make it a movie, tried to get other people to do it, and then after finding that people in Hollywood were busy, decided to just write and direct it himself. After almost thirty years in the business, this is Stewart’s directorial debut.

But of course Jon Stewart has enough sense to know this story is not about The Daily Show. That may be the hook and Jason Jones does show up to play himself for about a minute, but this is a story about Maziar Bahari and Iran. The Daily Show’s importance to this story is not exaggerated. It may even be diminished by Stewart’s ever-humble view of his show’s popularity and influence. He is as ever the opposite of the arrogant self-important culture warrior of Fox News, Bill O’Reilly.

This is a very interesting movie; avant-garde is almost a perfect word for it. I hesitate to use that word because you probably are going to start thinking of black and white French movies, but let me explain. It has a very simple photographic style. The palette of the movie is not unlike a Paul Greengrass movie (Bloody Sunday, United 93, Bourne Ultimatum) so it has a true documentary style feel to its movement and an almost non-existent directorial style. The acting also is simple and direct. Lastly the production value does not add anything more than what you would see in real life. But at the same time it makes rather extraordinary choices in digital effects. For instance, during the 2009 election demonstrations, the movie employs digital twitter art to show that the streets are alive with social media. At another time as Maziar Bahari (played by Gael Garcia Bernal) walks down the street, the storefront windows start showing memories from his past concurrently with an explanatory voiceover. These are odd show-offy effects movements that have been seemingly dropped out of the sky in what is otherwise a very non show-offy movie. The same goes for the editing style of the movie, which freely employs flashbacks and jump cuts. I’m not saying it did not work because I don’t think they were too disruptive to the tone but they were at least a little. Then again, at other times the avant-garde choices really do work. For instance, in solitary confinement Maziar has several imaginary talks with his father and sister who were also imprisoned for political activism in their time. So John just goes ahead and puts real actors in the jail cell with Maziar and has them talk like they are really there. At another point he decides to play Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love,” in the jail cell like it is really there. That was sublime. All of this is the effect of having a person who doesn’t really know how to make movies (but really knows how to communicate with an audience in the medium) be at the helm for the first time. The decisions make sense but they also feel like they were dropped from space. This is an odd little movie.

But what ultimately makes the movie worth seeing is the humor and empathy it employs towards its subject, several months of solitary imprisonment and interrogation that borders on torture. You would not think it by looking at it but the title of the movie is a joke. It refers to the cologne that Maziar’s interrogator always wore. Apparently this middle-aged somewhat portly balding tough guy thought he should smell like a rose all the time. Little details like this fill the movie. The start itself owes a bit to Franz Kafka’s ‘The Trial.’ That is, Maziar (played by Gael Garcia Bernal) is woken from his sleep by several men including Rosewater (played by Kim Bodnia) and is taken off to prison with no warning or explanation. There is no due process of law. He gets no phone call or lawyer. They make it clear that they will not let him go unless he confesses that he acted in concert with foreign spies. Now here is where Jon Stewart and Maziar Bahari make it interesting. Where a normal movie would treat the character of the interrogator as a one dimensional zeolot of Iranian ideology, this movie treats Rosewater as simply a bureaucrat who is just doing his job. In one scene we see him call his wife to let her know when he is getting home. In another he hopes for a promotion if he gets Maziar to confess. In another great scene, Rosewater’s boss comes into the room to show him how to interrogate this particular type of prisoner. Maziar, an educated professional, is a bit above Rosewater’s pay grade. He usually beats up uneducated poor people. Here Rosewater is directed to get a confession by using his head and not his fists. Maziar needs to get on TV and admit his guilty without any obvious signs of torture. Rosewater is not really up to the task and it is kind of sad actually. Especially in a couple funny scenes where Maziar takes advantage of Rosewater’s obviously repressed sexuality. This is a great performance by Kim Bodnia and I hope he is gets an Oscar nomination out of it.

At the same time though, the character of Maziar is taken out of the culture war as well. In one great scene he has a discussion with his father who was imprisoned and tortured by the Shah in the 1950s because he was a devout communist. His father does not want his son to admit guilt and to stay strong. Maziar retorts that he has a wife that is pregnant with his child. Would he deprive them of a husband and father for an ideology? Wasn’t his father’s imprisonment and torture based on the Soviet system of imprisonment and torture? What loyalty does Maziar have to any ideology when almost all of them are headed by total assholes that imprison and torture people? This is a sentiment I’m sure bares influence from Jon Stewart whose show on Comedy Central is guided by the strong insight that although the national dialogue may be controlled by the yelling and shouting of unnecessarily provocative pundits and ideologues, the vast majority of people are preoccupied with their own lives and shit, are willing to cooperate and compromise with those they have differences with to make daily life easier, and share a general hope that the idiots in charge don’t fuck up their lives too much. And Maziar probably agrees with that too. Hey that’s another thing we may have in common with Iranians. 

Fury 3/5 Stars

‘Fury’ purports to be one type of movie, does it exceedingly well, and right at the moment of truth blindsides the audience with an incredulous conclusion that has no right whatsoever to be in a movie of its type. This movie is intended to be a serious movie about a very specific place and time, the invasion of Germany in World War II by Allied tank divisions. War is hell, the movies shows. Hitler, the ultimate asshole, refuses to give up a lost cause going so far as to start conscripting German children into the army and hanging those that refuse to fight. The allied tanks roll past hanging corpses of kids with placards hung on them that read ‘Coward.’ The other children have guns and so the Allies have to kill them themselves.

As most war movies feel they sort of must do, we are introduced into one particular tank division through the eyes of a green youngster by the name of Norman (Logan Lerman).  Get it? Norman equals Normal Man. This is a cliché but not a particularly bad one. After all I don’t know anything about tank warfare or warfare in general and sort of need a character to identify with. The tank division is led by Wardaddy (Brad Pitt). He has a tight knit group of gritty comrades. Among them are Grady ‘Coon-ass’ Travis (Jon Bernthal), Trini ‘Gordo’ Garcia (Michael Pena), and Boyd ‘Bible’ Swan (a nicely non-annoying Shia Lebouf). You will get to know these guys as well as you can possibly get to know guys in war in a two hour movie, that is, pretty well. The movie, which is serious, shows them dirty, drunk, vile, prone to epithets, and perfectly willing to take advantage of desperate poverty stricken german women, which very much happened during the war, all over the place. At one point after Norman conscientiously refuses to shoot dead bodies on the ground to make sure they are dead, Wardaddy takes him over to a real life German prisoner of war and orders him to shoot him in the back. ‘I made a promise to get my men out of the war alive, and you are making it harder for me to make good on that promise,’ Wardaddy tells him matter of factly before forcibly putting the gun in Norman’s hands and making him pull the trigger. A little hardhearted? Well, no, that’s just war.

There are two excellent scenes in this movie. One is a tank battle between three crappy American tanks (and yes historically speaking they were crappy) against a superior German panzer. Watching the scene I was struck with the truth that I had never seen a tank battle in a movie before. At least I had not seen one with as much suspense and clarity of strategy as the one here. Apparently the thing about American tanks is that they weren’t built strong enough to withstand german tank fire. One direct hit and the inside of the tank would burst into flame burning everyone inside alive instantly. Those things were literal death traps.

The second excellent scene takes place immediately after the allies take a town. Wardaddy spies an occupied apartment and takes Norman in to it to explore it. Inside they find two German women (played by Anamaria Marinca and Alicia Von Rittberg) who undoubtedly are afraid that they will be raped and/or killed. Given Writer/Director David Ayer’s treatment of the first half of the movie, it is quite conceivable something along those lines may happen. It doesn’t happen and Brad Pitt instead puts the women to work making dinner from potatoes and eggs he has stashed. (This is a good deal given the fact that the German women probably haven’t had a decent meal in long time.) However, about twenty minutes through the scene the other three men show up and they are not happy that Wardaddy is having this dinner without them, and what about the women? And here we can notice a real balancing act of fine acting (and good writing) by Brad Pitt and company. Wardaddy won’t actually order his men to behave because they have been living through hell for years and will be back out there doing it again together no matter what happens in that dining room. His loyalty to his men stops him from putting two anonymous German women over his crew. But he also does not want a mean scene to occur. So he stops it essentially by declaring he is going to have a nice meal and won’t allow his boys to stop it. He provokes good behavior by example and his boys follow him because of respect not necessarily because it is the right thing to do. This is a long and complicated dinner table scene (which are not easy to shoot/edit) and it speaks much about the director’s faith in his audience’s attention span and emotional intelligence to grasp the meaning of what happens in it.

Of course, the last scene in the movie is like a nice hard slap across the face reminding the viewer that yes the director and/or producer and/or studio ultimately thinks you are a mass-market dumbass. The last scene is a John Wayne avalanche of bullshit. Think of every stupid (i.e. not serious) and false thing you’ve seen in a war movie. It is inexplicably all contained in this one final last stand battle where our heroes are prepared to commit heroic suicide against an entire foot division of S.S. soldiers. Why these particular guys we just got to know as people who very much want to live would want to commit heroicide is completely beyond me. Why there is an entire division of well-uniformed S.S. troops marching around from nowhere to somewhere is also beyond me. Why would the battle take all day and all night long? Why would the S.S. waste so many men in dumb charges? Why couldn’t they just bring that sniper guy up at the beginning before so many of them died? Why would the German stop shooting so the wounded good guys could say tearful goodbyes to each other? All of this, what is it doing in a serious movie?

Did David Ayer think that I wouldn’t be satisfied if he didn’t end his movie with a ‘Wild Bunch’ climax? If he didn’t think so, what was the point of making a serious movie about war at all? Why didn’t he just make the whole thing bullshit? I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all. There was so much good stuff here that I can’t even say the ending ruined the movie for me. It just did not feel like it was part of the same movie at all.