Movie/TV recommendations

[Stuart]

Interstellar is the most frustrating movie experience I've had in a while. You can tell that there is a good movie in there somewhere, it's just buried under cliched dialogue and a failed attempt at recreating parts of 2001. It's the fastest moving three hour movie I've ever seen, which means that the movie never felt long, but I also never felt that it gave its audience enough time to understand or appreciate what was happening on screen. The idea that love is this powerful force that can transcend time and space is something that I am willing to accept in a certain kind of movie, but Interstellar wanted to be three kinds of movies all at once, and ended up weakening its central point. The overuse (and misuse) of the Dylan Thomas poem was also unhelpful.

 

Matt Damon's character had no business being in this movie. His subplot was the nadir of the film and he also has the worst reference to the Dylan Thomas poem in the whole movie. The father/daughter relationship stuff was mostly fine, but I couldn't stop thinking about the son. Poor Casey Affleck. Guess your dad doesn't love you enough to cross the fifth dimension or even ask where you are when he is resurrected on the Saturn station.

 

My thoughts exactly. I had a convo on Twitter with a friend where we discussed how Nolan's directing and writing style doesn't fit well with big, high concept films like Interstellar. He is, like most people have pointed out, the anti-Spielberg, a man focused too much on giving as much narrative details (aka, exposition, blegh) than showing us that amazing beautifully rendered vista that his CGI team worked on for months. 

 

I put it this way: Take note on how long all those sweeping, majestic shots of space are. Under a smarter big film director (like Spielberg, who was attached to this film beforehand and it SHOWS), those shots would be longer, portrayed in all their grandeur and majesty. Using, ya know, visuals to tell a story in a medium all about visuals, but Nolan doesn't care about that, when he films, shots are there to serve his stupid overbearing plot. He should seriously return to making smaller, focused films like Memento and The Prestige where he can wax philosophical and use his directing style to far better use than in a film that begs for more grand visuals than grand monologues. 

 

The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar are getting the critical jabbing they deserve, let's hope its a wake up call for Nolan. Because right now, Interstellar is probably the worst space opera I've ever seen.

[CollegeBaby]

The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar are getting the critical jabbing they deserve, let's hope its a wake up call for Nolan. Because right now, Interstellar is probably the worst space opera I've ever seen.

 

That's a big call. Worse than Titan A.E., Chronicles of Riddick, Dune, John Carter, and the entire Star Wars prequel trilogy? Or have you not seen those?

[Gormongous]

The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar are getting the critical jabbing they deserve, let's hope its a wake up call for Nolan. Because right now, Interstellar is probably the worst space opera I've ever seen.

 

I'd love to have the old Nolan back, but I can't think of many instances where critically acclaimed directors who were ruined by big budgets and popularity come back to their roots in a way that's effective or compelling. I think we might be looking forward to another decade of mediocrity.

 

I think that everyone here has done a good job of encompassing why I was so disappointed by Interstellar myself. It's clearly a work of great ambition, but with no thematic coherency beyond the "love" theme pasted all over it, and I have a hard time giving it much credit considering how many of the characters and ideas are borrowed from previous Nolan films and done better many years before by other works of science fiction. When I realized that the standout moment for me was a robot genre-savvy enough to make jokes referencing 2001: A Space Odyssey and other killer computer tropes, I knew that "derivative" and "underwhelming" were going to be my watchwords going forward.

 

Also, I can't get over the implication that Casey Affleck named his son Cooper Cooper in honor of his father, who apparently only had a surname.

[Ben X]

Re. Interstellar:

 

A lot of people seem to interpret the film as overtly portraying Love as a tangible force that can traverse time, tell us things etc. As far as I could tell, the film didn't do that at all, it just had Brand desperately espousing that theory so she could get to see her lover again. Coop sends message through time using a fifth-dimensional construct and gravity, not Love. 

[Merus]

While I agree Brand was peddling hooey and no-one was having a bar of it, I have to wonder about its plot relevance if it was supposed to be read as hooey, because that makes the tesseract focusing entirely on Murph's bedroom and not, say, her office, a real weird coincidence. The tesseract was clearly facilitated by creatures/humans with the ability to freely manipulate dimensions, but if they're supposed to be far future humans, I kind of wonder how they worked out their assistance was necessary.

[BadHat]

Heeeey, Snowpiercer was pretty excellent! Now I'm sad that everyone's opinion of it is buried somewhere in this monstrosity of a thread.. I wanted to read those opinions now, damnit! :(

 

HI I HAVE AN OPINION ABOUT THIS

 

I thought Snowpiercer was very visually striking and the direction, in parts, was excellent (I was very excited on account of Joon-ho Bong directing). I also thought it was fucking duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuumb.

 

Actually though the thing that annoyed me the most was how drawn out all the action sequences were, and how little heed the movie paid to sense of space or time. Like the thing with them shooting eachother through the train windows (why?) from ten cars apart and then the bad dude catches up to them in like a minute flat. Then later in the movie it takes what feels like a full half hour exposition scene for the clubbers to catch up to korean dude from one car away. It really annoys me in action movies when the action is paced according to the narrative in such an extreme and implausible way.

 

Also was I the only one who thought like... does everyone on this train have to move through all these ridiculous cars to get to where they live? Where do they live? They go through the sushi car, aquarium car, school car, all these wacky cars and never seem to run into living quarters. Am I thinking about this movie too much?

[CollegeBaby]

Re. Interstellar:

 

A lot of people seem to interpret the film as overtly portraying Love as a tangible force that can traverse time, tell us things etc. As far as I could tell, the film didn't do that at all, it just had Brand desperately espousing that theory so she could get to see her lover again. Coop sends message through time using a fifth-dimensional construct and gravity, not Love. 

 

I definitely read into it as being symbolic though as that was ostensibly what allowed Cooper and Murph to succeed where the others failed, especially considering that Mann's point that the last thing you see before you die is the face of you children was extremely relevant as Cooper fell into the singularity.

 

I very nearly threw up during that scene with Brand though. I think that marked the point where the film started falling off a cliff for me. I have a low tolerance for hippy dippy sentimentality like that unless the film is campy up front, like the Fifth Element which is another love conquers all type film.

[Patrick R]

HI I HAVE AN OPINION ABOUT THIS

 

I thought Snowpiercer was very visually striking and the direction, in parts, was excellent (I was very excited on account of Joon-ho Bong directing). I also thought it was fucking duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuumb.

 

Actually though the thing that annoyed me the most was how drawn out all the action sequences were, and how little heed the movie paid to sense of space or time. Like the thing with them shooting eachother through the train windows (why?) from ten cars apart and then the bad dude catches up to them in like a minute flat. Then later in the movie it takes what feels like a full half hour exposition scene for the clubbers to catch up to korean dude from one car away. It really annoys me in action movies when the action is paced according to the narrative in such an extreme and implausible way.

 

Also was I the only one who thought like... does everyone on this train have to move through all these ridiculous cars to get to where they live? Where do they live? They go through the sushi car, aquarium car, school car, all these wacky cars and never seem to run into living quarters. Am I thinking about this movie too much?

 

It is illogical, but I think the tone supports it. The initial premise of the remnants of civilization being a train is such bald allegory that I never viewed it as anything other than fantasy.

[BigJKO]

Yeah, the absurd turns it takes never bothered me really.. the conductor even refers to the train itself as a "blockbuster production with a devilishly unpredictable plot."

 

I was pretty caught up in it all and the drawn out action scenes just helped me focus on the cinematography instead of the plot. I kind of liked that the action was paced in that way, because I feel like it kept it surprising throughout and went for maximum dramatic effect instead of realism.

 

I do agree that the shooting-through-the-windows bit was a bit puzzling. Rather than being wow'ed by it, I just kept thinking about the logistics of it.

 

I loved the Happy New Year reveal mid-way through the axe fight, though.

[Gormongous]

Re. Interstellar:

 

A lot of people seem to interpret the film as overtly portraying Love as a tangible force that can traverse time, tell us things etc. As far as I could tell, the film didn't do that at all, it just had Brand desperately espousing that theory so she could get to see her lover again. Coop sends message through time using a fifth-dimensional construct and gravity, not Love. 

 

I don't know. My gut says that if every character's preconceptions about love are validated by the events of the movie, then the movie's about love, even if it ends up calling it "gravity" and "the fifth dimension" by the end. The fact that Hathaway's character, who is only good at crying and stumbling in the words of Quarter to Three's Kelly Wand, actually ends up being completely justified by that awful second-act speech about love speaks volumes to me about the movie's (admittedly murky) thematic preoccupations.

 

Also, and this is an old hobbyhorse, but isn't it odd to see Neil DeGrasse-Tyson stumping so hard for the accuracy of Interstellar after eviscerating Gravity last year for making fewer and smaller mistakes? Is it just because the former's so bullish on the possibilities of space travel?

[Brannigan]

I don't remember him being that harsh on Gravity

[Gormongous]

I don't remember him being that harsh on Gravity

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzE6bKIKK3A

http://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/neil-degrasse-tyson-trolled-gravity-on-twitter

[Twig]

Also, and this is an old hobbyhorse, but isn't it odd to see Neil DeGrasse-Tyson stumping so hard for the accuracy of Interstellar after eviscerating Gravity last year for making fewer and smaller mistakes? Is it just because the former's so bullish on the possibilities of space travel?

Having not seen Interstellar, I can only guess that it's maybe because Interstellar is so much more hopeful for the future of space travel, while also being completely pessimistic about the future of earth, and maybe that puts him in a different sort of mood.

 

But I don't even have a clue really.

 

There's also the fact that Interstellar is working off of theoretical stuff, rather than the actually-real happening-right-now stuff in Gravity.

[TheLastBaron]

I don't remember him being that harsh on Gravity

Same. I remembered a couple of his tweets that were mostly jokey like the movie should be called zero gravity and the one about her hair not floating. I also remembered the tweet where he said he liked the film very much. Looking at that list of all of them they seem to be him either pointing out really obvious things (like the hair) or explaining things that most people probably don't know like the heights of the orbits. The only tweets where I feel like he's criticizing anything are the one about 2001 and the one about no one enjoying real people set in space.

[Roderick]

I have a very, very low tolerance for those 'everything wrong with' videos. They're flimsy excuses to make lame jokes, most of which aren't jokes at all but are telegraphed to be by the sound of that annoying 'ping'. Please stop making those.

[Bjorn]

I like them when they're making fun of shitty movies.

[RubixsQube]

I'm going to take a few steps back from what I said upon immediately seeing the film regarding it's scientific inaccuracies. I'm still pretty sour on the film as a whole, but they're primarily similar thoughts to what's been going on in this thread already. I think that, because Kip Thorne was brought on board to coach the science in Interstellar (and wrote a book about it, apparently), Neil deGrasse Tyson is maybe letting the science have more of a pass. I have read a few other comments around the internet that discussed the situation in the film (Gargantua is a supermassive black hole spinning very rapidly, which would allow for a planet to be relatively far away and still experience crazy 1 hour = 7 years relativistic effects, and the light that heats these planets is being emitted from the black hole accretion disk, which is depicted warped and twisted around the top and bottom of the black hole due to gravitational lensing of the light, etc etc etc), and it mostly seems as if the science sort of checks out, but it's set up in a very, very filmic way specifically for the story that the film wants to tell. It would be INSANELY unlikely for that sort of situation to come about naturally in a galaxy center.

 

OH, if someone has not seen it yet, or if someone in this thread goes and sees it for a second time, can you look out for something?

 

When Murph is having her late-film epiphany that her dad's watch is giving her magic binary signals from beyond or whatever, she goes into Michael Caine's old office to erase chalkboards (that dumb trope). At some point, they show her desk, and on it is a yellow/white writing pad that says "NGC" and then a series of numbers. I only noticed the NGC too late before the shot ended, and I want to know what those numbers are. My big question, as an AGN researcher, is which galaxy is hosting gargantua. If it's an object in the New General Catalogue, it's relatively local, and not ten billion light years from Earth. It's most likely just some dumb thing a set decorator wrote down because it seems astronomy-ey.

[Erkki]

Dang, the local dark nights film festival is about to start. I forgot all about it until today, haven't prepared at all. I have completely skipped it the past few years, but this time I already know two movies I definitely want to see: Jodorowsky's Dune and Hard To Be God

[Gormongous]

Same. I remembered a couple of his tweets that were mostly jokey like the movie should be called zero gravity and the one about her hair not floating. I also remembered the tweet where he said he liked the film very much. Looking at that list of all of them they seem to be him either pointing out really obvious things (like the hair) or explaining things that most people probably don't know like the heights of the orbits. The only tweets where I feel like he's criticizing anything are the one about 2001 and the one about no one enjoying real people set in space.

 

I know, it's just odd to me that his tone is so completely different with Interstellar, about which he is aggressively positive in multiple interviews even though it also has a lot of dumb science goofs in addition to blatantly hand-waving technology like single-stage orbital planes. It makes me wonder how egregiously inaccurate you could make a sci-fi movie and still get a thumbs-up from him for being positive about spaceflight and for having a respected scientist as a consultant on it.

[SecretAsianMan]

I just finished season 2 of House of Cards.  Still really confused on a bunch of stuff but it was pretty good.  Especially Kevin Spacey.  I almost want to play Call of Duty now just to see him some more.

[Merus]

Wouldn't it make sense that Neil deGrasse Tyson would be playing his cards a little differently this time? The headline ended up being 'famous TV astronomer hates movie about going into space' and not 'guys why haven't we been going into space Gravity was pretty cool'.

[zolen]

I can't wait to see episode 6 of walking dead season 5.

[Gormongous]

Wouldn't it make sense that Neil deGrasse Tyson would be playing his cards a little differently this time? The headline ended up being 'famous TV astronomer hates movie about going into space' and not 'guys why haven't we been going into space Gravity was pretty cool'.

 

Looks like you're probably right, since Tyson just started tweeting a bunch of Interstellar inaccuracies, too. That makes all of that substantially less odd, although the movie itself's still a mess. I don't know if anyone's linked it before, but there's a SlashFilm article comparing the 2008 script to the 2014 movie. It seems to be a more coherent and interesting movie overall, but too complicated and with some of the same thematic confusion, so... I don't know.

[Bjorn]

I just finished season 2 of House of Cards.  Still really confused on a bunch of stuff but it was pretty good.  Especially Kevin Spacey.  I almost want to play Call of Duty now just to see him some more.

I haven't wanted to play a CoD game since Modern Warfare, but I have to admit that Spacey being in the new one kinda makes me want to play it (or at least rent it to see him in action a bit).

[Stuart]

That's a big call. Worse than Titan A.E., Chronicles of Riddick, Dune, John Carter, and the entire Star Wars prequel trilogy? Or have you not seen those?

 

Whoah there, which Riddick are we talking about here? Also, as messy and convoluted Dune was, it had vision, despite its flaws, it is still Lynch at the top of his game. Interstellar felt restrained with its trite emotional bullshit and pseudo-philosophy. John Carter and the Star Wars prequels are bad, I'd put Interstellar up there with both of them. I haven't seen Titan A.E.

 

Also, while I'm here, I'll link this scene from Jodorowsky's Dune.