A Review of Interstellar... an almost immediate reaction

The trip to my local theater is one that I like during the warmer seasons since the closest distance I can get from a bus stop to the theater itself is a few blocks away so walking isn't that bad. But now it has gotten to the winter months and the temperature has dropped rather quickly when last week it was actually decent weather and this week its been really fucking cold so even a little walk will leave me with my feet and hands cold and numb. Why do I mention this? Because it will probably make my trips to the theater less common for a while especially in the Oscar Bait season since there are some movies that I really want to catch such as Big Eyes and I still haven't seen Nightcrawler yet since it never plays at the time I'm there and I don't want to stay there any later than necessary since I don't want to miss the bus and have to walk all the way home. It will make all the times that I do go much more worthwhile though yet I wish I had a ride I could depend on or at least someone to see some of the movies with especially the bad ones so it'll make some fun riffing. But onto the movie for today. Interstellar was one of those movies that I was looking forward to all year and I would have gone to the preview screening the theater was doing if I had a ride since there was no way I was going to get a bus ride at the time the movie would have ended.

This is the most recent film done by director Christopher Nolan, whose previous work doesn't really need to be mentioned due to the amount of praise his work has gotten over the years. The story had been one that Christoper's brother, Jonathan had been working on years prior and the film originally had Steven Spielberg in the director's chair, which having seen the movie makes some of the story decisions make some sense especially as we get to the ending. It is hard to look at the plot of the film along with the scope of the picture and not compare it to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that is well known for being the apex of a science fiction film that pushes the boundaries of what the medium can do. Since I have not seen 2001, I really cannot compare the two films but from what I have heard of it, I think that while Interstellar might be invoking that type of film but it is more trying to appeal with the mainstream or maybe not trying to be artsy for arts sake. The basic gist of the film is that a future Earth has turned into a more larger scale version of the Dust Bowl era of America and food is running out fast so an underground NASA sends a team of astronauts to find the next refuge for humanity. Inside of this plot is the story of a father and a daughter, Cooper and Murphy. Cooper is made the pilot of the trip to a wormhole where there may be some planets that humans can survive on. Doing so, he leaves his family behind, which aside from Murphy includes his son Tom and father in law Donald. Murphy deeply resents her father's decision to go and grows to hate him over the passing years that he is gone, all the while working at NASA in her adult years trying to figure out how to get the space stations that the rest of the Earth will take to whatever place they find.

The first thing that I can praise almost instantly is the special effects which are beautiful to look at, especially since a lot of them were done practically which is insane in this day and age. The production design of the planets that the crew of the Endurance go to, mainly the ice covered world where Dr. Mann had been hibernating. There is also the beauty of Gargantua, the black hole where the planets that they travel to are orbiting. I don't know how much of the stuff that in the film is scientifically accurate but it really seems as if the production crew did their homework on many accounts and hopefully any mistakes that are caught do not take away from how powerful the visuals are. The best highlight I might have to give is the score by Hans Zimmer. It is really hard to describe how it made me feel but it seemed to always be able to perfectly encapsulate the moments that are going on in the scene at the time. Some have complained about how the score drowns out the dialogue sometimes but I really could not tell all that much even though I consider myself hard of hearing at least in my left ear.

As for the story itself, I thought it worked rather fine although maybe some of the most Spielberg like moments in the film do kind of stick out although not necessarily to the point where it detracts from the film too much. There are also some moments where it does get a little sappy but a couple of moments like that do work, such as when after visiting a planet where an hour there is seven years in Earth time, Cooper comes back to the Endurance and watches video logs his family made over the 23 years that had past due to the trip. This might get into spoiler territory so be warned but something that did kind of annoy me was the whole arc of Dr. Mann, who was described early on as being the best of what humanity had to offer and was the one to lead off the initial Lazarus missions to go to the planets and figure out whether or not they were suitable. When Cooper and the crew get to him, they find that he had been hibernating in stasis with no date of release set so he had essentially planned to never wake up due to how hopeless his situation had become. Yet when he is rescued, he no longer wanted to do the noble thing and almost sabotaged the whole plan B that Professor Brand had banked on from the beginning. The climax does get into a level of strangeness and confusion that it does feel like as if it would have fit nicely in 2001 and will probably leave me thinking a whole lot about it for quite some time. And then there is the ending after that, which might be the most Spielberg like moment of the entire thing, which is where most of the criticism draws from and for the most part, I really have no idea what to feel about it. I'm not sure if I actively disliked it or didn't mind it at all so I'll have to give it another go and see if it works or not. Maybe it does since there is this theme about love that continues throughout which could play into the plot as a whole. Again, I'll have to watch it again to see how my thoughts change the second time.

Overall, I can say that this movie is fantastic. It is by no means a perfect film and there are some things that I might look back and go "This doesn't work as well as I thought," but it is worth seeing it in the theater and despite its flaws, the almost three hour run time really doesn't feel that long. All the actors do a great job as well and for the most part I could predict that there are going to be some oscar nominations. I'm sure that the visuals and the sound will get nominated for sure and probably win a few. Where this ranks among the years best remains to be seen but I'm sure it will be somewhere in the top but Birdman really looks as if it'll take the top spot. I really should do a double bill of Birdman and Interstellar. Throw some Nightcrawler in there and it'll make a great day at the movies.

The Friedkin Connection #2 - Rampage

At the beginning of his career, Friedkin filmed a documentary called The People vs. Paul Crump, which followed a death row inmate whom at the time Friedkin thought was innocent and made the film in hopes that it would lead the courts not to kill Crump. It ended up working and the documentary ended up leading the way to the future filmography of its director. The subject of the death penalty and whether or not its use is justified is something that Friedkin has mixed opinions on in his life, being very much against it during the early stages of his life but currently sees that in some situations that it is the only option, which plays into the movie that I'll be talking about today, Rampage. Originally filmed in 1987 and only screened in Europe due to distribution issues until about five years after the fact, the film follows different groups of people who are involved in a case focused on the serial killer Charles Reese. One side is the prosecutor Anthony Fraser, who wants Reese to get the death penalty for his crimes despite being against it at first. The people trying to defend Reese seek to figure out if he was in a right state of mind during the killings or not.

The internal struggle of Fraser going against his own beliefs in terms of capital punishment does start off wavering as early on in the film, he visits the crime scenes, the one that convinces him to push for the death penalty being at the house of a family of four, the Tippetts. The father and one of the sons, Gene and Andrew, come home after a visit from the dentist to find the mutilated body of Gene's wife Eileen and the other son missing. I have to give credit to that scene where Andrew walks into the room where his mother's body is and starts screaming since that was really unnerving and even though we never see the body, it just feels a little more unsettling than expected. This was not the first group of killings though as Reese attacked the neighbors the day before yet Fraser seeing the surviving members of the Tippetts dealing with the circumstances and relating to the situation somewhat due to having lost his daughter a couple of months prior which also adds up to more of what convinces Fraser to want to get the punishment he believes the killer deserves.

Now lets get to the killer himself, Charles Reese played here by Alex McArthur, someone who I never really seen in anything before or since and from the looks of his filmography, it's kind of easy to see why. I could say that with pretty much the entire cast of the movie aside from Michael Biehn. who I'm sure a lot of people know who he is and for good reason. But there is something about McArthur that really does something with his character that I don't know how many people could have made it work as well and that is he is no matter what he does, he appears as quite a normal person in spite of the situations he is in at the time. He gets into small talk with a bunch of guards as he;s being transported like water cooler discussions between co workers. Another thing that makes this work so well is just how he plays it so we never get a real gauge of whether or not Reese is mentally unstable or he is aware of the situation and knows what he is doing. In other movies that do this, it is often where the killer does play it where he is pretending to be mentally unwell and it plays off as a twist ending of sorts and this movie doesn't really do that.

I mentioned before that the movie was filmed in '87 but did not get a US release until '92 due to distribution issues and when the time came for that US release, Friedkin did some re editing and changed the ending. I watched the '92 version so the ending I got was one that I am unsure what to think since I know what the original ending was but its one of those things where it could go either way maybe. I might have to give a lean towards the original due to how it did follow up on a piece of dialogue where Reese admits to some guards that he hopes that the courts find him guilty so that he won't have to sit in prison for the rest of his life. The revised ending does something else which is kind of interesting yet kind of anti cathartic as well.

There is also something that I want to bring up as well and that is the aspect ratio of the movie. I have no idea if that was the way it was intended to be or it was a fuck up on someone and I don't know who but the version I saw was in a 4:3 TV like format which did make me wonder if this was originally filmed as a made for TV movie, which really wouldn't be too far against Friedkin's alley since he did start off working on TV and even had two films after this that were made for TV (those being Jailbreakers and his remake of 12 Angry Men) but it did make things feel a little off since this did get a theatrical release and I'm curious what was done with the aspect ratio. But either way, I wouldn't put this as being a great film. I'd consider it good with a lot of parts that work really well and is worth watching just for Alex McArthur's performance and wondering why he never went anywhere afterwards. Out of the films I've seen of Friedkin's, its probably in the bottom but I've only seen six of them so far and I really love most of the others. So what will the next one be? I kind of wish it could be Cruising since I really want to see that so badly but maybe I'll do something more current, maybe the one that I was writing before this one but didn't finish, The Hunted. Or if you guys want me to talk about The Exorcist yet again, I'll do that.

No, the next one of this series will be The Hunted for sure.

Why I Don't Use A Rating System (Out of Laziness, Really)

To start off, I do get why rating things for reviews, either using 1-10 or F to A+, exists since it is perhaps one of the most simplest ways that one can look at a preview of said review and get some sort of expectations as to why a person thought that way towards the reviewed material. It works well when for the most part, one can agree with the reviewer as if each others tastes were similar enough where it could be a safe bet that if they liked it, so will you and vice versa. And yet it can often lead to a lot of backlash where the people who look at it go, "Why did movie A get score X when movie B got score Y?" either thinking that the score should be higher or lower. Honestly, I could just say that I am being lazy and that I why I don't use a rating system (and if I had to pick which one I'd use if I had to, it'd be a F to A+ type since the number system does have a flaw where most people will consider a 7 to be average, and below that the movie or game is terrible. I guess that could apply to the star system that below 2 1/2 stars could be called terrible). There is also the thing that came to mind when I watched a video about film criticism done by internet reviewer Chris Stuckmann (the link for the video if you are interested http://youtu.be/wJdfJVyDEQE) where he talks about how a ratings system can be sort of arbitrary and he brought up how he rated two completely different movies an A+ yet one is still better than the other, because the ratings applied to the specific genre so they are A+ movies in the specific genre but don't compare the same when put against one another. It also explains how certain movies on top 10 lists Chris has made where even though he gave movies higher grades than the ones on the list, it just depended on his feelings for the movies at the end of the year. And that might explain sort of why I choose not to use it for the time being, at least for the time I am doing written reviews (I don't know if or when I'll do video reviews). It can be a pigeon hole I guess for when you give something a grade for how you feel initially about a movie and when you look back at it, your opinion might change and you'll go "Why did I give this movie this score?" I think it's just better to say what I thought and whether or not the movie is worth watching or not. I might implement a score at some point but not for the time being.

The Raid: Redemption vs Hollywood's Highway to Hell... A Reflection

So it took me a while to get to seeing this movie for the first time, which is weird since I was always going like "This movie looks great and I should see it as soon as I can." I just didn't come up to do so until this Friday when I decided to go to Best Buy for the first time in quite a while, more so looking to see if there was any good anime on bluray for cheap (which wasn't the case this time, so I'll have to rely on the internet and online shopping for that sort of thing) but while I was there, I saw that there were some movies on sale cheap and one of them was The Raid: Redemption for $10 and I was like "Okay, let's finally see what all the praise this movie was getting was about" and I bought it yet didn't watch it until later at night. But when that time came, I kind of have to say that this was one of the best action films I've seen in quite a while. It was really intense and the fight scenes were really well choreographed and shot just as well to make every moment of action just as amazing as the previous one. So it's easy to say that I really enjoyed this movie and it'll probably be on a regular screening in my home when I feel like I'm in the mood for some straight up action. Whether it'll remain being one of the best action films of all time remains to be seen, although I do think that the lack of story might bring down the quality a little but what it lacks in story it more than brings in intensity.

While looking up some information regarding the team behind this, such as it's director Gareth Evans and the actors who do the large amount of the fighting in the movie, it was brought to my attention the one star review that the late Roger Ebert and a follow up article he did in order to defend his opinion on the film called Hollywood's highway to Hell. Now I know that there was more than one person who didn't like this movie or didn't think that the movie was as great as a lot of people thought it was and there will always be times where you can disagree with a person about things like this, I'm just the kind of person who would rather know why someone does or doesn't like something over the fact that they like it or not. So I read the article and for the most part, he did bring up some good points, such as the previously mentioned lack of story and character development which makes most of the characters nothing more than meat puppets to get pummeled on and killed, along with wondering if making a movie that can be generic but amazing at that is more than enough. That little bit brought up how Drive was advertised as a Fast and the Furious clone, which could have been much farther from the truth, leading to a woman to sue the distributors for how misleading the trailer was.

While I agree that Drive is a better movie than The Raid is for sure and he does have a point about how genre film shouldn't mean that it can just rely on just being good at the one aspect and have nothing of substance to back it up, sometimes you just need to be in the mood for something that is just pure action to just have some fun and even today there aren't that many action films that can have some entertaining sequences like The Raid. I could mention how some reviews of his could be hypocritical where he give a movie a negative review and a movie that is similar a positive one but I am not really interested about getting into a tirade about that. All I can say is that not every film has to be the best film that has ever been since what is the fun in that? Also is there even enough talent in film making for that to even be a possibility? Now having taste in film is a picky thing, as there are films that can be similar that each bring their own different feelings of each but there is a limit to how that can be. For example how how Halloween got all of the praise in the world and yet almost every slasher since has been criticized for being just a clone or being incredibly inferior. Yet when I compare the original Halloween to say Friday the 13th Part 2, there really isn't all that much different between the two aside from slightly better cinematography and a catchier soundtrack, yet Halloween 2 tried to be more like the slashers it inspired and didn't do all that well with it. All I can leave on now with this topic is The Raid: Redemption is good at being what it is meant to be: a solid action film. And I'm okay with that.

A Review of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

When I saw the trailer for this film, I was hooked yet I had no idea of what this movie was going to be about. I think the thing that made me want to see it the most was that it was starring Michael Keaton, an actor that I really like and haven't really seen him in much in a while (at least in movies that I have seen since he was in the remake of Robocop). It is really difficult to say whether or not I had any expectations of what this movie was even when I looked up a brief synopsis. The only real thing I could get from that little tidbit was that Keaton's character, Riggan Thompson, was kind of a exaggerated version of Keaton himself, a guy who got his big break starring in a series of superhero films but afterwards was never really able to make that transition into something more substantial. Riggan decides to do something different by writing, directing and starring in a play adapted from a work of writer Raymond Carver's, who had turned out to be the reason why Riggan wanted to become an actor in the first place.

One thing that I should talk about right away when it comes to this is the camerawork and editing, since the whole movie, aside from a few moments, looks as if it is all shot in one continuous take. With all of the movement on screen and the length of the scenes, this had to be one of the most challenging things to do (or at least do well) and it is not the kind of shots where you can really tell where the cuts are, such as if there is a black screen that last for a few frames just to disguise it. Due to how well the camerawork flows from this kind of trickery, the people who work on lighting and stuff really had their work cut out for them since even a little amount of mess up could screw up the flow. For things like this as well, the actors have to get a ton of credit for being able to perform as well as they do in all of that time that the scene is going on.

The acting itself is really wonderful as everyone seems to be at their best in this movie. Keaton is fantastic playing Riggan, a man whose desire to not be forgotten has manifested into some sort of delusion where he appears to have some sort of power to manipulate the world with superpowers and reeks of desperation as the play has left him broke, leaving him in an all or nothing type of situation. There is also Edward Norton, another actor who can be really good but I also haven't really seen him in much either lately, maybe being even more of an exaggeration of his real life persona as Mike Shiner, an actor who can only feel alive on stage and will do anything to improve his work even if he alienates everyone around him, which does lead to a lot of the film's humor due to his not give a fuck attitude when it comes to things outside of the play. Zach Galifianakis also does a really good job playing Riggan's lawyer/friend Jake, who wants the play to succeed at any costs (although maybe not to the extent that Thompson goes to at the end of the movie, which I will get to later). The rest of the cast does great as well, such as Emma Stone as Riggan's daughter Sam who works as her dad's assistant and Naomi Watts whose character Lesley is also a first time Broadway actor who really does not want things to screw up.

What I guess is the main theme of the story is how people just want to find their place in the world, to leave a mark or to make a difference at a point in their lives, which is the conflict that follows Riggan throughout. He does have a voice in his head, a manifestation of Birdman, speaking to him that tries to put him in his place and remind him of the real reasons why he is doing this, not because he believes that he can be good at this but that he wants to have people notice him again. That drive does come to a halt on many occasions like in a scene where he and his daughter get into a fight where she tells him that like the rest of the world, he doesn't matter, which deepens his feelings of irrelevancy. There is also where he comes by an article which has Mike being interviewed and taking Riggan's story about Raymond Carver as his own, which Thompson believes is taking away the spotlight from what is supposed to be his own passion project.

Another thing that manages to get some sort of humor is all of the times that the scene at the end of the play, where the lead confronts his wife having an affair with another man and proceeds to commit suicide after lamenting about how he doesn't exist, which does make the play itself more of a personal story to Riggan than expected since both he and the character he plays both feel a sense of isolation and no sense of place in the world and having no way to deal with that. But back to the topic, each preview screening ends up becoming a mess for multiple reasons, such as Mike getting into a drunk tirade or Riggan being locked out of the theater with only his underwear and a wig as his clothing. There is always this sense throughout that the play could fail at any moment which is exacerbated when Thompson meets up with Tabitha, a theater critic who doesn't like him and has her mind set on giving his play the worst review imaginable no matter what the outcome turns out to be, just to spite Riggan and everything she believes he stands for.

Which comes to the ending (SPOILERS btw), where now no matter what he does at this point, Riggan is going to fail due to the power that Tabitha has as a critic. This leads him to brandish a real gun on opening night for the climax of the play, where he tries to give it everything he has, knowing that this will most likely be the last performance he gives. He also has the idea where he might have his last chance at relevancy, if he is able to give the audience the most realistic way to portray a suicide on stage by actually trying to kill himself, so even if the play turns out to be a failure, that moment will always be remembered. After that, the audience is so dumbfounded, wondering whether or not he actually did it yet they applause it with a standing ovation. It turns out though that he missed his shot, only shooting off his nose and the play turns out to be a success. This was pointed out to me by someone else who watched it that it felt kind of out of place for the movie and that the ending turned out to be too happy. I can kind of see that and yet this does remind me of another movie that had a similar type of ending situation, that being Taxi Driver, which also has some similarities to Birdman when given some thought. Taxi Driver at the end, after Travis kills off Sport and the other guys at the underage den of prostitutes to save Iris, leaving him mortally wounded, has something more upbeat where Travis is treated as a hero and garners some praise from the community even if he really is not a good person at heart, just the circumstances paint him as one for the time being, leaving one to wonder if the end of that movie is really the dying thoughts of Travis. Riggan does have somewhat of a similar story, where instead of becoming a tragic martyr of the acting craft, he is praised for his acting style, dubbed "Super Realism" and is showered with the attention he has desired since the beginning of the movie. That last minute though could lead to that this could all be a delusion of Riggan's right before he dies but I might be laying on the Taxi Driver comparisons a bit too much.

So what is with the subtitle The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance? If I had to say, maybe it could apply to Riggan and his delusion of how he wants to believe he is compared to what he knows he really is but maybe I am thinking about this too much. All I know is that this is one of those movies that comes once in a long while that kind of reinvigorates the desire of the art of film and why we as an audience watches movies. I know this is one of those that might be one of my favorite movies ever and easily my favorite of the year so far. I would like to know other people's thoughts on the material to see if people like it as much as I do.