Interstellar

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Grade: B +

Director: Christopher Nolan

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Jessica Chastain, Casey Affleck, David Gyasi, Wes Bentley, Ellen Burstyn, Mackenzie Foy, Topher Grace, John Lithgow and Matt Damon

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 49 min.

During the somewhat-distant-future in director Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, mankind’s pioneering impulse has been purposefully supplanted by a socially engineered “generation of caretakers.” With food resources becoming scarce, all but the best and brightest grade school children are steered away from college and into agricultural careers. Militaries have been mostly disbanded. School textbooks have been revised to reflect the “truth” that the Apollo space program was a hoax designed to lure the Soviets into a financially ruinous space race. A skeletal NASA has been literally and figuratively forced underground.

In other words, Nolan redirects the conservative political leanings of his Dark Knight trilogy into a space saga centered around a dad, grandpa and two younguns living in corn-covered flyover country, decimated by blight into a neo-Dust Bowl. The film stops short in its explanation for the crop decay and increasingly contaminated air that will make Earth uninhabitable for humans in a matter of decades. A drive-by explanation from Dr. Tom Brand (Michael Caine), an aging scientist, references excessive nitrogen dioxide levels but sidesteps any mention of climate change or human causes. “Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here,” Brand conspicuously declares.

“We’ve forgotten who we are,” bemoans former NASA pilot-turned-farmer Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), swigging on a beer and Nolan’s script. “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.”

Recruited by Brand, Cooper faces a Sophie’s choice whether to remain on Earth with his daughter Murph (played as a 10-year-old by Mackenkie Foy) and son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and betray his altruistic principles, or rocket into space on a mission to save the human race but leave his children behind to possibly perish on a dying planet.

Ultimately, Cooper follows the film’s refrain, Dylan Thomas’ villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” and completes a quartet of spacefarers who include the knowingly named Amelia (Anne Hathaway), Brand’s daughter, along with a sarcastic, interactive articulated machine named TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin). Their destination is a wormhole near Saturn, opened by an unknown someone/thing, that leads to another galaxy and a trio of possible habitable worlds, each named for three astronauts sent into the breach years earlier as part of the also knowingly titled Lazarus scouting expedition.

Interstellar is densely plotted, even confounding at times, and canopied by a constellation of plot holes and contrivances. And that’s before it arrives at an inscrutable, pretentious final act that’s part M. Night Shyamalan, part sappy Steven Spielberg. There was an actual Plan B available to Cooper and Amelia—and the filmmakers—that would have stamped this saga with poignancy coupled with the bittersweet hope of Eden. Instead, a script grounded on the virtues of courage and sacrifice ultimately shirks from both.

That said, the same critiques of being plodding, pretentious, illogical and capped by a head-scratching climax (or shaggy God story) were hurled at 2001: A Space Odyssey nearly a half-century ago, one of the many films Nolan admits influenced Interstellar’s captivating visuals and structure. [And in truth, being riddled with plot holes is a regular occurrence with Christopher Nolan scripts.]

Like Stanley Kubrick’s space-set magnum opus, Interstellar is epic filmmaking that’s operatic in its grandeur, ambitions and sheer scope—seeing the IMAX rendering is a must, despite some muddled sound mixing that’s increasingly endemic to Nolan’s films. Set to Hans Zimmer’s engrossing, relentless and pipe organ-laden soundtrack, the film envelopes the audience for its nearly three-hour running time and transports them on a journey to the far reaches of the cosmos.

But unlike 2001, the film also traverses a labyrinth of human traits and frailties: love, friendship, betrayal, pragmatism, idealism and family. Particularly, the parent-child relationship is reflected by the funhouse mirror of relativity, so that while Amelia watches her father die from across the stars, Cooper sees Murph and Tom (played as adults by Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck) age past him and grow their own families and lives.

Indeed, Nolan’s “caretakers” rejoinder may also be directed at the current generation of big-budget moviemakers, cogs in an assembly line of sequels-of-the-week and shoot ‘em ups. Interstellar is a big movie about big ideas—the intertwining of society, technology, the planet and humankind—that most studio bean counters would rather eschew since they don’t fit neatly inside a Happy Meal or video game.

The lineage of Interstellar is as old as D.W. Griffith and as recent as Spielberg. And while Thomas’ challenge to “rage against the dying of the light” refers to our resistance to extinction in the film, it’s also a clarion call to push the boundaries of an art form. The voyage might be bumpy and include some unfortunate detours, but it’s a helluva ride worth taking.

The Dark Knight Rises

 Wait, Aaron Eckhart is the real enemy?

Grade: B
Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Marion Cotillard and Joseph Gordon-Levitt
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 2 hr. 45 min. 

In any other universe, The Dark Knight Rises would be hailed as the apex of superhero moviemaking, a work of such technical breadth and narrative depth that it would redefine its genre. The problem, of course, is that the final leg of director Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy follows its two mega-hits predecessors, the now-oddly underrated Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Is it possible for any finale to live up to such hype and expectations? Probably not, but try and somewhat succeed as it might, The Dark Knight Rises could have done better.

In assessing the scope and influence of Nolan’s seminal series, it’s interesting to note that today there remains more demand than ever for such populist popcorn-munching fare as The Avengers, Spider-Man andSuperman (indeed, the second Man of Steel reboot since Batman Begins comes out next year). Nolan’s films didn’t commandeer the genre, but instead served as the rising tide that lifted all the other comic book boats.

Indeed, Nolan’s Batman trilogy is evolutionary more than revolutionary. The Batman mythos, particularly the fact that he’s a superhero without super powers, afforded Nolan a canvas to paint not only portraits about the fractured human psyche but also broad strokes about contemporary America. The dumbest thing about Rush Limbaugh’s latest blather (other than its source)—claiming that the use of the villain Bane in The Dark Knight Rises (a comic book character created in 1993) is a not-so-thinly veiled attack on Mitt Romney’s past work with the financial services company Bain Capital—is that Nolan’s entire Batman series has been a pulpit for post-9/11 neoconservative orthodoxy.

Nolan broadens his focus to more provocative lengths in The Dark Knight Rises. The film opens with the Batman in winter, eight years after the end of The Dark Knight and taking the fall for the murder of District Attorney Harvey Dent. The myth behind Dent’s death prompted an expansion of police powers that locked away thousands of criminals and largely restored order to Gotham City’s streets. And with the return of good times, the city’s corporate community has never had it better.

Batman remains in hiding, as does Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), now a Howard Hughes-like recluse whose intervening lack of fitness has left his body hobbled from those years of leaping and falling from Gotham’s high-rises. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman), a “wartime commissioner” on the cusp of being replaced during this era of peace and prosperity, remains haunted by the lies that helped bring about that peace and beleaguered by a fear of evil that he knows will never totally disappear.

Thus arrives Bane (Tom Hardy), a hulking, masked evildoer who holds himself out as the maniacal savior of Gotham’s poor and working class but whose actual aim is the annihilation of Gotham City itself. It’s no coincidence that the initial steps in Bane’s dastardly plan involve a complex co-opting of the city’s financial services industry and corporate boardrooms. And if that symbolism is too vague for you, Bane’s debut onto the public stage involves his eye-popping razing of a professional football game, a terrorist act preluded by a complete rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Over the ensuing weeks, Bane lords over a state of anarchy armed with a nuclear bomb harvested from a scrapped clean energy project originally financed by Wayne (take that, Greenies!). He frees the criminals, and anything of value is declared common property. Kangaroo courts presided over by Dr. Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy, now appearing in all three of Nolan’s Batman films) are convened to try would-be dissidents to this new social and economic construct. Unbeknownst to anyone, however, Bane’s bomb is designed to explode on its own at the end of five months.

That’s also about as long as The Dark Knight Rises seems to last. An unfortunate byproduct of Nolan’s rising esteem as a filmmaker is the license to indulge that comes with it, a penchant for bloat that occasionally crept into The Dark Knight before going full-blown in Nolan’s Inception. The relatively economical 141-minute running time of Batman Begins has now metastasized into 165 minutes of amorphous atmospherics punctuated by Han Zimmer’s blaring power chords.

While that’s still an hour shy of Lawrence of Arabia, you’d think Nolan would find time to tie together the strands of his labyrinthine plot. One of the film’s high points is the relationship that forms between Wayne/ Batman and Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway, terrific), a slinky cat burglar hailing from Gotham’s seedy side. One imagines the feisty, resourceful and mostly amoral Kyle as Bruce Wayne had he grown up poor and female, and their banter oscillates between flirtatious, humorous, poignant and foreboding. Still, the genesis of Kyle’s costumed, feline-themed alter ego (the name “Catwoman” is never uttered) gets little screen time, as does the basis of her mysterious association with Bane.

Faithful butler and confidant Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine) disappears during the first half of the film only to briefly reappear at the end, both without logical explanation, and the film suffers from the absence of his emotional core. Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a fine job playing John Blake, an honest Gotham cop, but he garners more screen time than Bane and uses most of it expounding bromides about justice and steering orphans away from one danger or another. And, Wayne’s tryst with Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), a Wayne Enterprises board member and sustainable energy activist, is totally unbelievable and purposeless.

Large portions of the storyline to The Dark Knight Rises derive from DC Comics’ 1993 “Knightfall” story arc—fanboys needn’t worry about Nolan pulling his punches in depicting the epic first fight between Batman and Bane. Moreover, Nolan ably brings his film saga full circle, revisiting the League of Shadows that Wayne rebelled against in Batman Begins and the power of mythmaking that informed the conclusion to The Dark Knight.

However, while The Dark Knight Rises is high on pathos and allegory, it’s also unwieldy and lacks the charisma, wonder and sense of discovery found in its forerunners. Hardy is a compelling young actor, but it may as well have been Vin Diesel obscured behind Bane’s ever-present mask and digitally distorted voice. And, when it’s hard to shake the notion that the villains’ motives and backstory were partly derived from a middling James Bond entry like The World Is Not Enough, it becomes even dicier to divine import from the rest of the morass.

The Dark Knight Rises is both entertaining and interesting. But it is not the grand, transformative spectacle that Nolan obviously intended. Many of its missteps are of its own making. But like its Caped Crusader, it also buckles from the demands heaped upon it by the 99 Percent who have enjoyed and now justifiably come to expect success.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at Indyweek.com  

Best Films of the Decade: 2000-2009

by Neil Morris

Ever since Moses brought down the stone tablets from atop Mount Sinai, people have gravitated to the Top 10 list. Perhaps no entity – aside from David Letterman – has utilized this olden construct more than film critics, who each year employ it to apply one last stamp of (dis)approval to the world of cinema.

Once every decade, however, we enjoy the rare treat of reaching back in time to not only rehash the best films of – you guessed it – the last ten years, but also reassess the way films have improved or withered with age.

In compiling my roster of the ten best films during 2000-2009, I looked back at the annual top 10 lists I began formally assembling in 2002, the year I began writing movie reviews. For starters, my top two films of the decade were released before then, and nothing I have seen during the ensuing seven years of critiquing films threatened their place atop my list.

Moreover, of all the films I declared at the time to the best of their respective years, only five merited a spot among the decade’s top ten. Over time, a number of films have grown in my estimation, while others have not matured as well, each for a variety of reasons. That is the wonder of cinema: the way a film speaks to you evolves due to personal and societal changes.

So, I commend to you – and your Netflix queue – my choices for the best films of the last decade. See you in another ten years!

Best film of the decade: Requiem for a Dream – Director Darren Aronofsky took Hubert Selby’s book about drug addiction and created a kinetic, transcendent masterwork about loss and unfulfilled promise. A trendsetter, including both visually and for Clint Mansell’s relentless score, this gut-punch of a film – more than any other this decade – advanced the medium of cinema.

2. Memento – Christopher Nolan’s best film remains this hypnotic thriller/character study, not his otherwise superb Batman entries. More than a structural gimmick, this is sublime cinema that combines indie inventiveness with populist moviemaking, resulting in a neo-film noir that is made better by its narrative loose ends.

3. The Pixar canon – Besides saving and revolutionizing the waning animated movie genre, Pixar’s sterling film collection stayed enjoyable to viewers of all ages while managing to mature with its audience. Consider this: 7-year old kids who started off watching Toy Story back in 1995 became the 15-year olds diving into the underwater Finding Nemo, 16-year olds flying away with The Incredibles, 19-year olds escaping into the world of a Parisian kitchen in Ratatouille, 20-year olds captivated by the futuristic WALL-E, and today’s 21-year olds floating away to far-off adventure in Up.

4. There Will Be Blood – Part Citizen Kane, part Stanley Kubrick, director P.T. Anderson’s tour de force speaks to the valor and iniquity of American individualism, and also encapsulates the longstanding feud between capitalism and orthodox religion. Daniel Day-Lewis’ portrayal of oilman Daniel Plainview is arguably the defining film performance of the decade.

5. United 93 – The most emotionally affecting film experience of the decade. Five years after September 11, 2001, director Paul Greengrass accomplishes the unthinkable: a technically proficient rendering that horrible day that manages to honor the departed, praise the heroes, explicate and damn the villains, and skewer the bureaucratic morass that paralyzed our governmental institutions. It is not only an exacting post-mortem on the day our world stood still, but also a celebration of the better angels of our nature.

6. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford – Far and away, the most underrated film of the decade. Director Andrew Dominik – backed by a haunting score and gorgeous cinematography from the indomitable Roger Deakins – composes a gorgeous, lyrical meditation on celebrity and the concept of hero-worship, a longing gaze on the sepia-soaked days of yesteryear refracted into a piercing commentary on our con

temporary culture.

7. Munich – Critics have lashed Stephen Spielberg’s most provocative film with every strap of iniquity – amoral; pro-Jewish; anti-Israel; pro-Arab; anti-American; misogynistic; an act of appeasement; etc. These contrasting labels are integral to Spielberg’s complex portrait of Israel’s reaction to the murder of its athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics and, by extension, America’s post-9/11 foreign policy. The film is designed not to advocate, but equally critique the sons of both Isaac and Ishmael.

8. The Bourne trilogy – This is the authoritative movie series of the decade (not Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Spider-Man, or the Star Wars prequels), along with being the most exhilarating, intelligent additions to the indispensable action-thriller lineage.

9. Traffic – Using several interconnected storylines, Steven Soderbergh conjured a sprawling, multi-faceted examination of the war on drugs from viewpoints both macro and personal. This is filmmaking at its most epic and informative.

10. City of God – The beauty of this film, set amidst the favelas of Rio De Janeiro, can be found in its narrative scope and visual poetry. Director Fernando Meirelles crafts a gritty, powerful saga that is as poignant as it is brutal.

Best of the Rest: Children of Men; The Wrestler; King Kong; Friday Night Lights; The Aviator; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Kill Bill Vols. 1 & 2; The Queen; Slumdog Millionaire; About Schmidt; Gangs of New York; Million Dollar Baby; 21 Grams; Whale Rider; Infernal Affairs; The Pianist; House of Flying Daggers; Batman Begins; The Dark Knight; Bridgett Jones’s Diary

The Dark Knight

"The Dark Knight" has money to burn...

Grade: B +

Director: Christopher Nolan

Starring: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, and Morgan Freeman

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 32 minutes

In a film full of fascinating sequences and thick with symbolism, the most revealing scene in The Dark Knight takes place during an interrogation of psychotic mastermind The Joker (Heath Ledger) that Batman (Christian Bale) carries out with blind brutality. It is notable that the information Batman seeks to elicit from his enemy combatant turns out to literally be ticking time bombs, and, later, that those who afford The Joker with a right to make his one phone call meet their demise as direct result of indulging this legal luxury. However, the most sobering truism comes when the homicidal Joker confesses that the one person he least wants to kill is his caped nemesis because Batman, by crushing and cornering the city’s desperate criminal elements, has forced them to turn to the lone, albeit crazed voice promising them salvation. Batman thereby elevates the status of a self-proclaimed “agent of chaos” from petty thief to crime boss.

In this parallax universe, it is the equivalent of George W. Bush chatting with Osama bin Laden, and that allegory is clearly writer-director Christopher Nolan’s intent throughout Dark Knight. Admittedly, nowadays you can throw a dart at a newspaper movie listing and hit a film with some post-9/11, Bush-world pastiche. But, whereas 2005’s Batman Begins was Nolan’s indictment of society’s post-9/11 fear neurosis, its sequel is a nuanced, occasionally convoluted examination of the consequences of the Bush Doctrine. More than once, Joker is referred to as a “terrorist,” with much hand-wringing over whether to appease his demands or drop the gloves and fight back. Man-servant Alfred (Michael Caine) relays a story from his youth about an allusive, woodland-dwelling jewel thief who stole not for monetary gain but rather just for the heck of it. Their ultimate method of capturing him – “We burned down the forest.”

As Dark Knight opens, we witness a Batman both regaled as a savior and reviled as a vigilante. Moreover, he has embraced the mantle of preeminent superpower. His excursion into Hong Kong to retrieve a mob accountant from the protection of Chinese anti-extradition policy and deliver him to police custody comes off as a form of rendition. Later, Batman’s expansion of a sonar detection device into a massive means for tapping every cell phone in Gotham City, over the ethical objections of its inventor, gadget-wiz Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), is analogous to Bush-era domestic surveillance techniques.

The ends justify the means for the Dark Knight, which is why the ascendance of District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) represents hope for not only Gotham but Batman as well. Dent is an aggressive prosecutor whose heroism falls within the bounds of the law. That Joker targets him more than Batman is no accident, for Dent embodies an (American) ideal that Joker strips of his innocence and deforms into a conflicted, savage husk who jettisons his principles for the sake of vengeance against foes both real and collateral - a scene in which a slowly-disintegrating Dent badgers a paranoid-schizophrenic henchman for information at gunpoint mirrors the true-life beating death of a mentally ill prisoner at Abu-Ghraib.

While terrific, Dark Knight is not the masterpiece many would proclaim. With a running time of over 2 ½ hours, the storyline is bloated and meandering at times, desperately needing some careful editing to excise the copious extraneous scenes that interrupt the narrative flow. Nolan tries to squeeze too much into a finite frame, occasionally bogging the film into a state of unintended ennui. To compensate, the director punctuates his canny, yet gelatinous theme-building with several exquisite, speaker-rattling action sequences and a superb cast that includes Maggie Gyllenhaal, an upgrade over Katie Holmes in the role of Bruce Wayne’s inamorata, Rachel Dawes. Bale again ably fills the Bat boots, although his synthetically-enhanced growl is sometimes difficult to understand and distractingly absurd.

And, while many will cite Ledger’s tragic death as the impetus behind any critical praise he posthumously receives, the backdrop of real-life circumstances dissipates the moment The Joker arrives onscreen. Emoting equal parts menace, humor, eeriness, melancholy, and even charisma, Ledger’s performance is so mesmerizing and hypnotic that it nearly transcends the rest of the film. By his own admission, Joker feeds off disrupting the societal order – again quoting Alfred, “Some people just want to watch the world burn.” Joker astutely observes that if the police shoot some gang-banger or a dozen troops die in a foreign war, few people take notice. However, if you threaten the life of one public official, society hurls into a state of turmoil.

Accordingly, for all the Bush-basing by proxy, The Dark Knight’s most complex, compelling portion comes during an extended epilogue in which Batman engineers a bit a message-control in order to bear the cross of villain rather than allow the real evildoers to bask in the glory of their mayhem. Is Nolan suggesting that Bush and his ideology ilk, for all their misguided delusions, endure the brickbats of naysayers as the price for fighting the good fight and beating back the barbarians at the gate? Whether you agree or not, the inescapable answer is yes.

However, Batman also comes to realize that the way to win the war is not just brute force, but also robbing your opponents of the grandeur they crave. By way of analogy, the doctrine of “preemption” and the Damocletian sword of American military might have lent a soapbox to megalomaniacs such as Hugo Chávez, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Kim Jong-il. The way to combat real-life villains is to marginalize not only their resources but also their aura, thereby strangling perceived power and influence. Without a pulpit and stripped of their masks of evil, they all just look like a bunch of crazy jokers.

Neil Morris