It's a magical world

This is another movie that I've been tracking obsessively on IMDB, and I was very happy to see that it was playing in San Francisco when I got here last week. I think it was Kate Elliott on Twitter who made a comment about it last year that tipped me off, and I have to say, it's one of the best and most stylish SF movies I've seen in a while. I would highly recommend it to just about everybody.

The plot is simple, and revealed within the first five minutes: a young software developer at a tech giant (Blue Book, sort of like Google crossed with the Weyland Corp.) wins a company-wide lottery to spend a week at the reclusive founder's estate…to serve as the human component in a(n unorthodox) Turing Test, since it turns out the the reclusive founder has been spending his time working on AI, and he's come damn close.

There's a lot to say about the Turing Test, gender, artificial intelligence and the various ages of cybernetics beginning in the 1950s and they way they have understood information versus consciousness with respect to embodiment. I'm a big fan of Kate Hayles' book How We Became Posthuman, which means that I'm a highly informed skeptic about all of those topics from a feminist perspective, and the thing I liked best about the movie was how shockingly intelligent it was about all of these things. Everything in the movie is consciously commenting on these exact same issues (just as Caleb, the programmer, quickly learns that his selection wasn't random at all), and it even throws a commentary on race into the mix. It's also pretty realistic about the culture of the tech world and Silicon Valley, even though the location of the estate is never mentioned (Norway has never looked more beautiful on film) and Caleb lives on Long Island. And the movie uses all of those aspects to tell a pretty darn good story that doesn't go anywhere I expected. The film is far more feminist than it lets on almost until the credits roll.

Interstellar. Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2014.

This movie got such mixed reviews from Twitter I nearly didn't go see it, but I'm glad I did. It's my favorite Nolan movie in a while, but I think it's his most genuinely felt movie in years, or possibly ever. And as a science fiction movie, I think it's pretty great. I think opinions about science fiction movies tend to be pretty mixed among SF fans, and it's certainly true that I haven't seen every SF movie that's come out since Contact (hey wait, both those movies feature Matthew McConnaughey, in diametrically opposite roles), but for me it was definitely worth mentioning in the same breath as that movie. Indeed, if anything, I'd say it's our generation's 2001.

At the outset, let me say that what I liked about the movie was the performances, the score (holy shit, the score. I don't think Hans Zimmer has ever done better, and that's saying something), and also the fact that it was so intensely emotional. This is a movie that always relates the consequences of its grand concepts back to the emotions of its characters, and as a consequence, I cried at multiple points, for the first time ever at a Nolan movie. I don't cry easily by any means, and for that reason I tend to use it as an aesthetic judgment. By those measures, this movie was great.

( Arguments about metaphysics and science )

All that being said, I do think part of the reason the film got me so hard is because I've more or less lost all hope for humanity. The film tells, at its heart, the comforting lie that our future is still something we can control, which I really doubt is true at this point. I think it's all over in a hundred years, more or less, and so like Kierkegaard's knight of faith, I've decided to act like there is hope while believing that there is none. And maybe the grounds for criticism that I would find legitimate is that Nolan chose to tell this story, rather than a more despairing one. But I also think it's true what Cooper says, that hope takes courage and despair is the coward's way out. So, courage. Do not go gentle into that good night.

First things first: I'm still selling a bunch of genre (and a few random academic) books.

Second: Who's going to Con.txt? I am!

Third: that movie meme!
Everyone should post their ten most CRUCIAL CRUCIAL CRUCIAL-ASS movies, like the movies that explain everything about yourselves in your current incarnations (not necessarily your ten favorite movies but the ten movies that you, as a person existing currently, feel would help people get to know you) (they can change later on obviously).

1. The Hunt for Red October (1990)
2. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
3. The Return of the Jedi (1983)
4. The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
5. Ronin (1998) ("Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt.")
6. Croupier (1998) ("Hang on tightly, let go lightly.")
7. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
8. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
9. My Blue Heaven (1990)
10. Moonstruck (1987)

Honorable mention: Troop Beverly Hills (1989)

The Punk Singer, dir. Sini Anderson (2013)
I went to see this as a Double Union outing, and I actually really liked it--it's an excellent documentary about the life of Kathleen Hanna, the lead singer of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, and about riot grrrl. I did wonder, given the people I know, whether the documentary didn't pay enough attention to the women of color who were doing riot grrl, but Hanna's story is grimly inspiring. Rock on.

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, dir. Justin Chadwick (2013)
I went to see this with an activist friend of mine and we really liked it. IDRIS ELBA. NAOMI HARRIS. I really liked that the movie showed how Mandela's imprisonment changed both him and his wife, and that her story wasn't subordinated to his; it also had a lot of focus on the actual tactics and strategies of activism, and I appreciated that the movie insisted on Mandela's refusal to renounce violence.

Her, dir. Spike Jonze (2013)
I thought this one was pretty terrible--in the near future, men's fashion goes to shit, and even beyond the fact that the protagonist is totally uninteresting (which may be the point?) the love story between him and his OS, voiced by Scarlet Johansson, is mostly unbelievable. I liked the ending, but probably Amy Adams was the best thing overall about the movie.

The Grand Budapest Hotel, dir. Wes Anderson (2014)
The Royal Tenenbaums will probably always be my favorite, but I think this may be Wes Anderson's best movie yet. I really need to read the works of Stefan Zweig.

Veronica Mars, dir. Rob Thomas (2014)
I have not seen the TV series (a flaw I am working on remedying), but I really liked the movie! I think Veronica/justice is my OTP.

The LEGO Movie, dir. Phil Lord & Christopher Miller (2014)
I loved this movie. It was so funny, and so charming, and so pleasantly un-focused on the current mode of capitalism (even at the same time that it reinforces it, but that's capitalism for you). Really, the send-ups of Batman were worth the price of admission alone, but then it just kept getting better!

Let the Fire Burn. Dir. Jason Osder, 2013.

I went to see this documentary, about the 1985 MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, because I'm from the Philadelphia area (I went to high school in the city, in point of fact) and because the MOVE bombing is undeservedly forgotten--so much so, in fact, that when I was explaining the incident to someone while explaining the documentary ("the city police bombed a house where a radical group was holed up"), they said, "What do you mean, 'bombed'?" There's only one definition of that word that applies here. As someone from the area, it was somewhat interesting to see figures I can remember from childhood, such as the Channel 6 newsheads and Ed Rendell, who became mayor in 1992, in their younger days. From the documentary you can see why Rendell in particular had such a successful political career (in 2003 he became governor of Pennsylvania)--even as you know his hands aren't clean, you watch him say the right things in a charming and mollifying way, and you don't think as badly of him as you do of other players in the tragedy.

I knew about the MOVE bombing because the only novel I know of about it, John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire, was the summer reading book my freshman year of high school. (If you've read that book, its assignment will tell you a lot about my high school.) The book focuses on the child survivor, Michael Moses Ward alias Birdie Africa, but it also focuses on the person who allegedly, rather than try to escape the house to safety, turned and went back into the fire.

The documentary mostly takes a cinema verite approach, meaning that it's largely constructed out of archival footage, principally news video, photographs, the deposition of Michael Moses Ward, one of the only two survivors of the bombing, and the public commission hearings held in October 1985, five months after the bombing, that attempted to investigate what happened.

( What happened is largely predictable, until it wasn't )

Europa Report. Dir. Sebastián Cordero, 2013.

This is one of the best science fiction movies I've seen in years. I turned to my friend J after the credits rolled and I said, "This is the movie that Prometheus wanted to be," and I stand by that statement. Europa Report blends a great story and a real love of space exploration with a meticulously unfolded, decidedly plausible science fictional premise and great performances from its actors.

The movie tells the near-future story of the first human-crewed mission to Europa, the Europa One, organized and funded by the private company Europa Ventures, LLC. For the first six months of the mission, cameras inside and outside the spacecraft connect the Earth and the astronauts in near real-time, but after unforeseen developments knock out the communications system, those left on Earth can only wait for communications to be re-established. Meanwhile, up in the Europa One, the crew must attempt to carry out its mission to seek out extraterrestrial life on Europa, if it exists, alone in the dark. Europa Report is the story of what happened after Europa One went dark, and what the crew found there. Post tenebras, lux.

It looks like the movie's theatrical run is coming to an end, but if you can't catch it in theaters you can still rent it on Google Play or the iTunes store, and I really recommend it! If you like space exploration or science fiction, particularly in the lower-key, realistic vein of movies like Moon, this is for you.

Orlando. Dir. Sally Potter, 1992.

This movie was maybe not the best choice to watch immediately after I got my wisdom teeth out. It's been probably about ten years since I read the book, which given that Wikipedia tells me the book is different, is probably salutary. In particular the atmosphere of each is very different--the book is dreamlike, but the passage of time is much more punctuated in the movie, which jumps from era to era with very little indication of any change, other than the costuming.

I very much enjoyed the movie all the same, because the costuming is gorgeous and Tilda Swinton is brilliant, and the settings were also pretty amazing. Basically I will watch Tilda Swinton in everything, and I was not disappointed in this movie. I liked the fact that in the film Orlando has a daughter, not a son. I also liked the fact that the movie was pretty upfront about the fact that it's society's expectations that change around Orlando based on its own prejudices about gender, not that Orlando's behavior or character ever changes. Ah, feminism.

I went to see Iron Man 3 with several awesome people last night. Many awesome people have said more interesting things than I have to say about this movie, so the following is mostly a collection of links and a few bullet points of commentary, but it's all going under a spoiler cut all the same.
( When the big guy with the hammer fell from the sky, subtlety went out the window. )

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Dir. Peter Jackson, 2012.

Having now seen this movie twice, in HFR 3D and in 2D, obviously, I quite enjoyed it. I deliberately didn't re-read the book before seeing the movie, but I don't have to do so to realize that the principal thing PJ has done, in bringing The Hobbit fully into the ambit of The Lord of the Rings and its appendices, is all but obliterated the whimsical quality that The Hobbit shares with Tolkien's other early works--Letters from Father Christmas comes readily to mind--but not his later ones. I liked that whimsy, once I learned to appreciate it; but at the same time, it's good to go back to Middle-Earth. I haven't realized, but it's been nearly ten years since The Return of the King, and I've missed it powerfully.

The first of the Hobbit movies covers approximately the first third of the book plus a good chunk of back matter from the Appendices. I know where PJ is playing fast and loose with the time scales of various parts, but almost all of it is canonical. (EXCEPT THAT DAMNED RABBIT SLEDGE, WTFFFFFFF.) The Appendices have always been some of my favorite parts--IF PJ DOESN'T DO THAT THING WITH GANDALF AND THE SMOKE RINGS AND SARUMAN AT THE LAST MEETING OF THE WHITE COUNCIL I'M GOING TO FLIP OUT SO HARD--and I loved seeing this stuff on the screen, not least because Galadriel is my absolute favorite and bringing in the Appendices stuff puts her back on the screen, and gives the movie its only female character with a speaking part. I could watch the bearers of the Three Rings chum it up in Rivendell forever, not gonna lie, though Christopher Lee totally nailed the Sarumansplaining.

I liked the dwarves! I liked them more than I thought I would, and I was suitably impressed by Richard Armitage as Thorin, though I am bored by his not-quite-canonical dwarfpain and really really really wonder whether PJ is going to work in Thrain's canonical fate or not--I hope so! It also struck me that PJ is really playing up the Hobbit/LotR::Thorin/Aragorn parallels, which is somewhat tiresome but was also well done, at least in this movie, which plays the once-per-trilogy deus ex eagle card to great effect. (Sidenote: Aragorn is fairly low manpain, isn't he? I like that about him, and resent that Arwen's plotline was basically sacrificed to give him angsty backstory.)

I feel like Peter Jackson is really imitating George Lucas in these movies--making the prequel trilogy after the first trilogy--and the cinematic hobbyhorse that PJ is riding is shooting at high frame rate, specifically 48 fps (as compared to the standard 30 fps). epershand and I shelled out extra cash to see the film in HFR 3D, and it was wildly disorienting. The HFR image is very oversaturated, which actually (because modern 3D is done with polarization rather than color-splitting of the light) really flattens the 3D effects. Because the HFR is so hyper-real, however, it has the paradoxical effect of looking really cheap, like a K-drama or an old BBC show, and also of making Middle-Earth seem really real, like the filmmakers just went out and cast a random dragon and some trolls in these parts. It was really, really disorienting, and particularly at the beginning of the film, it makes the cinematography look like total crap, which it isn't. I got used to the effect partly, but never totally--every so often there would be a shot that would jar me out of my acclimitization, and I'd be left thinking again that it was so weird.

My sister and I saw it in 2D on Christmas night, and she actually reported a lot of the same impressions I had even at standard frame rate and without the 3D. To me, the 2D seemed pleasantly normal, though with rather too much detail of everyone's pores for true comfort. Movies are not life! Cinema is artificial, and I like it that way! And it's not like I can't go to Middle-Earth already--the Green Dragon has a Facebook page, FFS--so while I enjoyed the hyperrealism, I don't actually need ti. PJ: let the HFR go.

On Christmas night we did not see it with our fellow geeks and nerds, and the people in front of us actually turned around and glared at me when I laughed at Bilbo's last line. Don't look at me if you haven't read the book, fools! It's funny if you've read the book, and I refuse to apologize for having read the book.

Postscript: Andy Serkis as Gollum = still amazeballs. SOMEBODY GIVE THAT MAN AN OSCAR ALREADY, FFS.

Bonus postscript: If you haven't read Sarah Rees Brennan's Hobbit parody of hilarity, do so.

Skyfall. Dir. Sam Mendes, 2012.

I saw this movie twice in four days. I really have only two questions: whether it's the best Bond movie ever (almost certainly), and whether Craig is a better Bond than Connery (almost certainly).

I really, really liked this movie. Aside from it being slashy as hell--and it was; there were multiple points at which kuwdora and I could only clutch each other in mute disbelieving joy ("Is this actually happening?" "Yes.")--it was also really funny in a way that the other Craig outings haven't been. And I loved Casino Royale and I also actually really like Quantum of Solace, but I'd forgotten how fun Bond could be, and this movie brought that back, in spades, while keeping the best of modern Bond, and in particular Craig's Bond. In a word, the action was brilliant, the supporting and female characters were great, M was a badass, and at the end we went back to the future, which is just like the past but only without the annoying sexism and the ridiculous gadgets. (Q: "We don't really go in for that sort of thing anymore.")

( Spoilers have got to be joking. )

I hope the next two Craig films, and the franchise, don't lose what Skyfall has gained. I also think that, while Brosnan was the first Bond I saw in theaters and always had a good deal of my affection for that, his movies may well turn out to be in front of only Roger Moore's in the end. What the Brosnan era added, in retrospect--and I suspect that Goldeneye, the first, will turn out to be adjudged the best--was fleshing out the secondary characters, which the Craig films have excelled at. James Bond will return. I can't wait.

ETA: Go read toft 's post on Skyfall, the final three paragraphs say everything I think about this movie.