Interstellar

It’s close to three hours long. There’s that. Also, Interstellar, released in 2014, is a space odyssey with no UFOs, no different looking beings from another planet, no alien coming out of the chest of protagonist Matthew McConaughey. It shows a hopeful side of director Christopher Nolan that will upset “The Dark Knight” fans. Also, didn’t Alfonso Cuarón just win an Oscar for directing “Gravity?” How long are audiences expected to really delve into the space stuff?

What the nitpickers are missing about “Interstellar” is how gripping it is, how gracefully it combines the galactic and friendly, how neatly it explores the infinite in the tiniest human details.

Peter Travers said in his review, “Of course, Nolan has never been the cold technician of his reputation.” Watch “Memento” again, or “The Prestige,” or the underrated “Insomnia.” What really makes “Interstellar” stand out is how Nolan wears his heart on his sleeve. Nothing like emotion to hold someone like him up to criticism. Travers said, “But even when Nolan strains to verbalize feelings, and the script he wrote with his brother Jonathan turns clunky, it’s hard not to root for a visionary who’s reaching for the stars.”

Travers continued, “Which brings us to a plot full of deepening surprises I’m not going to spoil. The poster for Interstellar presents McConaughey surveying a wasteland. It’s meant to be Saturn, but it could just as well be Earth, where environmental recklessness has morphed the planet into a Dirt Bowl starving and choking its citizens.”

Nolan spends the first third of the film in the American farm in the near future, introducing us to widower Cooper (McConaughey), a former test pilot, who depends on his father-in-law (John Lithgow) to help raise 15-year-old son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy). Like her dad, Murphy is a rebel who refuses to buy into her school’s official saying that the Apollo space program was a lie.

It’s when dad and daughter find the remains of NASA, led by Cooper’s old boss Professor Brand, played by Michael Caine, that the story starts to pick up. Cooper goes into space to find a new planet to live in, leaving behind two kids who may never forgive him.

The physics lessons (Cal-tech’s Kip Thorne checked) start when Cooper captains the Endurance mother ship with a science team consist of Amelia (Anne Hathaway), Brand’s daughter, Romilly (David Gyasi), and Doyle (Wes Bentley). Travers joked, “And don’t forget R2-D2 and C-3PO. Not really. The ex-military robots of Interstellar are called CASE and TARS.” The great Bill Irwin voices TARS, a loquacious pillar that looks like something from Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and sounds like the HAL 9000. (Travers said, “Note to viewers: Kubrick’s 1968 landmark and George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise are part of Nolan’s DNA. React accordingly.”)

Travers noted, “Next comes the wow factor that makes Interstellar nirvana for movie lovers. A high-tension docking maneuver. A surprise visitor. A battle on the frozen tundra. A tidal wave the size of a mountain. Cheers to Nolan and his team, led by cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema and VFX supervisor Paul J. Franklin (Inception). See Interstellar in IMAX, with the thrilling images oomphed by Hans Zimmer’s score, and you’ll get the meaning of “rock the house.””

However, it’s the final, quieter hour of “Interstellar” that gives the film quality and lasting value. Travers notes, “All the talk of black holes, wormholes and the space-time continuum take root in Coop when he realizes his two years in space have occupied 23 years on Earth.” His children, the now-adult Tom (Casey Affleck) and Murphy (Jessica Chastain), inform of decades of joys and resentments in video messages that Cooper watches in speechless silence. McConaughey gets everything without featuring one of them. He’s an expert, his face a road map to the life he’s missed as his children vent on him with so many emotions.”

I think everyone could tell that McConaughey was on a roll. Starring along beautifully with the inspiring Chastain, who puts amazing bravery and grace in Murphy. Familial love is the focus, not the romantic type. How does that work into space journey? Nolan gives Hathaway a monologue about it. Travers said, “But dialogue is no match for the flinty eloquence shining from the eyes of McConaughey and Chastain. They are the bruised heart of Interstellar, a film that trips up only when it tries to make love a science with rules to be applied.” In “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Kubrick saw a future that was inevitable. For Nolan, our reliance on one another is all we have. Travers said, “That’s more the stuff of provocation than a Hallmark e-card.” Nolan believes it’s better to think through a movie than to just sit through it. I think that is a great idea.

Now I must be honest, this movie is long. I didn’t like the fact that it was near three hours, because it kept changing from boring to engaging. There was not a set area and kept switching, but still, it was a good movie. I think you will be able to get into this, if you can sit through the movie in one sitting. If not, then you can watch it in parts. That’s what I have been doing with long movies during the pandemic. You can still watch this because it’s not a complete waste of time and is still a good movie. Expect a cameo from Matt Damon.

Alright, that concludes “Space Month.” I hope everyone liked this month. Look out next month when I start back up with this year’s “Black History Movie Month.”

Gravity

In “Gravity,” released in 2013, George Clooney plays an expert astronaut who looks hilariously like Buzz Lightyear, and Sandra Bullock is a medical engineer who is taking her first mission into space and is having a hard time keeping a stable stomach.

Owen Gleiberman said in his review, “They float around in the inky silent darkness, bobbing and gliding, with Earth spread out beneath them like a giant luminescent screensaver. Even when tethered to a spacecraft, the two are really out there, exhilaratingly and terrifyingly free.” The miracle of the movie is the way that director Alfonso Cuarón, using special effects and 3D with a nearly graceful ease and command, places the audience exactly in space along with the two characters. “Gravity” is an amazing technological look of a movie, one that might be put in the science fiction genre, except that it’s not a futuristic fantasy. It’s a story of disaster and grief and survival focusing on the possibilities of space travel as they exist today. Part of what makes the film so engaging is that it gives its characters no easy escapes.

Gleiberman noted, “The famous 10-minute tracking shot in Cuarón’s “Children of Men” was a bravura act of staging, yet watching it, you could tell that it was thought-out and choreographed. In Gravity, though, the director works in such an ingeniously flowing and sustained way that his images all but transcend the essential visual grammar of “the shot.” The camera glides through space, twirling and doubling back, following the characters through pod doors and into the cramped interiors of satellites and then out again, giving the entire movie the spontaneous feel of a single unbroken shot — a free-floating galactic reverie.”

At the beginning we hear radio rambles of talk between the astronauts and Houston, and then, almost gradually, a spacecraft flies into view from the right side of the screen – it’s a U.S. shuttle, and the astronauts are walking outside of it, trying to repair a problem on the ship. Gleiberman noted, “You’ll surely be reminded of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” because what Cuarón echoes from Kubrick’s great film — and what still seems eerily surreal in an outer-space movie — is the creeping rhythm of space, the weightlessness that places everything in a trance, turning the action into moment-to-moment semi-slow motion, a feeling of life suspended. Simply as an out-of-this-world, zero-friction “ride,” “Gravity” is unforgettable, yet the real essence of Cuarón’s achievement is that the film’s technical virtuosity and its emotional grip become one.”

Clooney’s Matt Kowalski and Bullock’s Ryan Stone are on a routine mission, but then there’s a bulletin from Houston. A Russian satellite has exploded, causing a chain reaction. A shower of debris is about to come flying right at them, so they must abort the mission. It’s too late, however: The debris hits them, full force (Gleiberman said, “the 3-D places us right in the hurtling metal thick of it”), ripping the ship apart. Seconds later, there is no ship. They are lost in space.

Gleiberman said, “The ebb and flow of “Gravity’s” story is deeply organic — it seems to be making itself up as it goes along, and that’s how it hooks us. Yet what sustains our absorption is a rather tricky synthesis between our involvement in the characters’ plight and our head-scratching wonder at the matter-of-fact way that the film brings the physical realities of space to life: the sheer cosmic terror of it, the images of satellites cluttered with drifting matter, from chess rooks to tears.” The actors are impressive. Clooney shows a haunting loyalty beneath his rage, and Bullock is as desperate and resourceful and anxious and brave as Sigourney Weaver in the last half of “Alien.” When Stone twists, slowly, out of her space suit, we realize that we’re seeing a story of rebirth, and Bullock’s acting reaches a new purity. She floats through this movie yet grounds it, letting “Gravity” connect with everyone these days who feel just a little lost.

When I saw this movie, I was surprised at just how fast it went, and with just two actors. I had never seen anything like this, but for what they did, they really pulled it off. If you haven’t seen this, you should. This is a must. I give it a high recommendation. You will love with how they really showed two people in space and how being lost in space is quite fearful. No one wants to go through that, and Bullock really captures the fear of being lost in space. Check it out to know what I mean.

Look out next week when I end off “Space Month” with a film that is good, but was needlessly too long.

Armageddon

Here we have the first 150-minute trailer. “Armageddon,” released in 1998, is put together like its own highlights. Take almost any 30 seconds randomly, and you have a commercial. The movie is painful on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense and the human wanting to be entertained.no matter what they’re paying to rent, it’s worth more to return.

Roger Ebert said in his review, “The plot covers many of the same bases as the recent "Deep Impact," which, compared with "Armageddon," belongs on the American Film Institute list.” The movie tells a similar story in fast-forward, with Bruce Willis as an oil driller who is recruited to lead two teams on an emergency shuttle mission to an asteroid “the size of Texas,” which is about to crash into Earth and kill everything – “even viruses!” Their job: Drill an 800-foot hole and stuff a bomb into it, to blow up the asteroid before it kills everyone.

Ebert asked, “OK, say you do succeed in blowing up an asteroid the size of Texas. What if a piece the size of Dallas is left? Wouldn't that be big enough to destroy life on Earth? What about a piece the size of Austin? Let's face it: Even an object the size of that big Wal-Mart outside Abilene would pretty much clean us out, if you count the parking lot.”

Ebert continued, “Texas is a big state, but as a celestial object, it wouldn't be able to generate much gravity. Yet when the astronauts get to the asteroid, they walk around on it as if the gravity is the same as on Earth. There's no sensation of weightlessness--until it's needed, that is, and then a lunar buggy flies across a jagged canyon, Evel Knievel-style.”

The movie starts with a Charlton Heston narration telling everyone about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Then we get the eventful title card, “65 Million Years Later.” The next scenes show an amateur astronomer seeing the object. We see expert meetings at the Pentagon and in the White House. We meet Billy Bob Thornton, head of Mission Control in Houston, which apparently works like a sports bar with a big screen for the fans, but no alcohol. Then we see regular people whose lives will be changed forever by future events. Everything is completely stolen – there’s barely an original idea in the movie.

“Armageddon” is said to had nine writers. Why did it need any? Ebert said, “The dialogue is either shouted one-liners or romantic drivel. "It's gonna blow!" is used so many times, I wonder if every single writer used it once, and then sat back from his word processor with a contented smile on his face, another day's work done.”

Disaster movies have little pieces of everything life. The dumbest in “Armageddon” involves two Japanese tourists in a New York taxi. After meteors set an entire street on fire, the woman complains, “I want to go shopping!” Ebert said, “I hope in Japan that line is redubbed as "Nothing can save us but Gamera!"” Meanwhile, we breeze through a romantic subplot involving Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck. Liv plays Bruce Willis’ daughter. Ben is Willis’ best oil driller. Bruce finds Liv in Ben’s bunk on an oil platform and chases Ben all over the area, trying to shoot him. (You would think the crew would be busy by the semi-destruction of Manhattan, but it’s never mentioned after it happens.) Helicopters arrive to take Willis to take Willis to the mainland so he can lead the mission to save mankind, etc., and he insists on using only crews from his own rig – especially Affleck, who is “like a son.” Ebert said, “That means Liv and Ben have a heart-rending parting scene. What is it about cinematographers and Liv Tyler? She is a beautiful young woman, but she's always being photographed while flat on her back, with her brassiere riding up around her chin and lots of wrinkles in her neck from trying to see what some guy is doing. (In this case, Affleck is tickling her navel with animal crackers.) Tyler is obviously a beneficiary of Take Your Daughter to Work Day.” She’s not only on the oil rig, but she attends training sessions with her dad and her boyfriend, hangs out in Mission Control and walks onto landing strips right next to guys wearing foil suits.

Characters in this movie actually say: “I wanted to say…that I’m sorry,” “We’re not leaving them behind!,” “Guys – the clock is ticking!” and “This had turned into a surrealistic nightmare!” Steve Buscemi, a crew member who is diagnosed with “space dementia,” looks at the asteroid’s surface and adds “This place is like Dr. Seuss’ worst nightmare.” What Dr. Seuss book is he thinking of? Ebert noted, “here are several Red Digital Readout scenes, in which bombs tick down to zero. Do bomb designers do that for the convenience of interested onlookers who happen to be standing next to a bomb? There's even a retread of the classic scene where they're trying to disconnect the timer, and they have to decide whether to cut the red wire or the blue wire. The movie has forgotten that *this is not a terrorist bomb,* but a standard-issue U.S. military bomb, being defused by a military guy who is on board specifically because he knows about this bomb. A guy like that, the first thing he should know is, red or blue? "Armageddon" is loud, ugly and fragmented.” Action scenes are put together at confusing pace out of hundreds of short edits, so that we can’t clearly see what’s happening, or how, or why. Important special-effects shots (like the asteroid) have a darkness of detail, and the movie cuts away before we get a good look. Ebert said, “The few "dramatic" scenes consist of the sonorous recitation of ancient cliches. Only near the end, when every second counts, does the movie slow down: Life on Earth is about to end, but the hero delays saving the planet in order to recite cornball farewell platitudes.”

Ebert admitted, “Staggering into the silence of the theater lobby after the ordeal was over, I found a big poster that was fresh off the presses with the quotes of junket blurbsters.” “It will obliterate your senses!” reports David Gillin, who obviously writes nonfictionally. “It will suck the air right out of your lungs!” vows Diane Kaminsky.

If it does, consider it a mercy killing.

This is worse than “Deep Impact,” if you can believe that. I remember seeing the beginning of the movie a long time ago when my siblings were watching it, but when I watched it a few years back on Netflix, I had wasted a good amount of time on this waste of a film. Don’t see it because you will not like this one bit.

Now that we have those two abominations done, stay tuned next week when I talk about a good movie in “Space Month.”

Deep Impact

Happy New Year online readers. For the start of the year, I would like to look at certain movies that take place in space. Let’s start off with the 1998 disaster flick, “Deep Impact.”

Early in the film, we find out that a comet “the size of Mt. Everest” is on a collision course to Earth. There looks to be two possible outcomes: The comet hits Earth, destroying it, or the comet does not hit Earth, and humanity is saved but the audience does not get to look at lots of special effects. In the first case you don’t get the necessary happy ending, and in the second everyone leaves feeling cheated.

Most doomsday movies avoid this choice by carefully choosing less than apocalyptic events. A volcano, a twister, or a tidal wave can give lots of scary special effects and still leave a lot of people standing. However, “Deep Impact” looks to back itself into a corner, and maybe that’s why the producers hired not one but two of the smartest writers in Hollywood to work on the film: Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin. Roger Ebert said in his review, “Together, they've figured out how to have their cake and eat it, too.”

How do they do this? Ebert said, “I would not dream of revealing their inspiration, although you may be able to figure it out yourself.” Meanwhile, you can enjoy the way they create little bits of fun in the dialogue, which cheers what is, after all, a formula disaster movie. What’s the formula? Different typical characters are introduced, they’re given personal problems, and the story goes between them as the moment of disaster gets closer. Ebert said, “I always think it's more interesting if they know from the start that there's a big problem; I get tired of scenes in which they live blissfully unaware of the catastrophe unfolding beneath their feet, or above their heads, or wherever.”

“Deep Impact” starts with the necessary opening pre-disaster, in this case a runaway rig that drives down a Jeep and kills the astronomer who is brining news of the approaching comet. (Ebert said, “I always think it's more interesting if they know from the start that there's a big problem; I get tired of scenes in which they live blissfully unaware of the catastrophe unfolding beneath their feet, or above their heads, or wherever.”) Then there’s a little ritual media-hating. Tea Leoni plays a reporter for MSNBC who believes there’s more to the story of a cabinet official’s resignation. She blames him of having an affair with a woman named “Ellie,” and he gets to say, “I know you’re just a reporter, but you used to be a person.” (The approved media response to this is, “Look who’s talking! A Cabinet member!”) Soon she sees her mistake. He is resigning not because of Ellie but because of E.L.E., which is an acronym for “Extinction Level Event.” He wants to spend more time with his family and has saved a yacht with so many cases of vitamin Ensure. He must not have been invited to the meeting where it was explained that all life on Earth would be destroyed by the comet, or the other meeting about the 1,000-foot-tall tidal wave. Ebert said, “My guess is, the president wanted him out of the Cabinet.”

The president, played believingly by Morgan Freeman, goes on TV to tell the bad news to everyone, and talks of the Messiah Project, which will send a human operated U.S.-Russian space craft to put nuclear bombs in the comet and blow it up. We meet the Messiah crew members, including old Spurgeon Tanner, played by Robert Duvall, called out of retirement because he once landed on the moon and might be able to land on the comet.

The younger crew members hate him, we are told, however rebellion onboard is never followed up on. The veteran has a nice group about the young ones: “They’re not scared of dying. They’re just scared of looking bad on TV.” There’s another good line at the high school assembly where the kid, played by Elijah Wood, who also find out the comet is honored. A friend tells him, “You’re gonna have a lot more girls starting now. Famous people always get more girls.” Ebert admitted, “And I liked a line from late in the movie, when one hero tells another, “Look on the bright side. We'll all have high schools named for us.”” However, the movie as a while is very basic. There’s a difficult subplot where Tea Leoni resents her father (Maximilian Schell) for divorcing her mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and marrying a bimbo, and though Redgrave brings a nice sad moment to her scenes, the rest of the subplot play out strangely like a place to put two humans in front of a large special effect. There also are some very unconvincing scenes where millions of people try to run from a city, and everyone one of them are stuck in congestion except, obviously, for the two who are required by the story to get somewhere quick.

Ebert ending his review by saying, “Whether Earth is saved or doomed, or neither, I will leave you to discover for yourself. I personally found it easier to believe that Earth could survive this doomsday scenario than that the Messiah spacecraft could fly at thousands of miles an hour through the comet's tail, which contains rocks the size of two-car garages, without serious consequences. On the disaster epic scale, on which “Titanic” gets four stars and “Volcano” gets 1.5, “Deep Impact” gets 2.5--the same as “Dante's Peak,” even though it lacks a dog that gets left behind.”

I don’t really like this film, but then again, this was a mindless disaster flick from the 90s. I don’t recommend anyone to see this, since this is an average film that doesn’t really hold up today. If you do see this, then you’ll know what I mean.

Next week I will look at another space disaster film that was released some time after this one in “Space Month.”