November 8, 2014

Drove to the mall to see Interstellar in IMAX, despite an increasing sense of certainty based on reports from professionals & amateurs alike that it was likely to be kind of a trainwreck.

It was. Unlike everyone else whose writing I’ve read so far, I feel no particular compunction to avoid spoilers, so down here at the end of this arrow, there will be some. You have been warned.
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Interstellar falls into that category of movies which look to investigate the meaning of life from within the scaffolding of science fiction (as opposed to more straightforward space opera, like Star Wars).

I’m more or less equally interested in both categories in my reading of sci-fi books, although I think I hold the philosophical ones to a higher standard, because bad philosophical sci-fi is really really bad.

And there have been plenty of great movies in this category, to be sure: 2001 (which is overrated, but that’s a conversation for another time), Blade Runner, the Alien series, the first Star Trek movie, plus more recent smaller entries such as Her, and Under The Skin.

But there have also been a decent number of wretched overambitious muddles, most recently Prometheus. And now Interstellar.

To catalog all of its offenses would take far more time and space than I’m probably interested in taking here. But some highlights:

  • Endless didactic exposition during the first earthbound hour – I felt like I was sitting through some kind of pro-science, pro-NASA propaganda flick whose authors thought they had cleverly disguised as a fiction film.
  • An obnoxious (and highly publicized) allegiance to pure science & the laws of physics right up to any of too many various points in the movie where they just threw it out entirely
  • such as the climactic moment when McConaughey plunges directly into a black hole, but instead of being crushed instantly, he instead finds himself inside of a tesseract composed of an infinite number of discrete views into his daughter’s bedroom, arranged along a timeline, such that he is able to communicate with her younger self by shoving books out of her bookcase in morse code sequences
  • this resulting in a fairly elemental time-travel paradox which the filmmakers don’t even bother to be embarrassed by.
  • Uncredited major Matt Damon role.
  • Matt Damon in a spacesuited fistfight with McConaughey on an ice planet that is nearly as stupid-looking as that dumb Spock fistfight in the last Star Trek movie.
  • Anne Hathaway giving an earnest speech in defense of love which we’re kinda-sorta supposed to scoff at but clearly also kinda-sorta supposed to wholeheartedly believe in, particularly when she’s kinda-sorta vindicated in the end.
  • Ex-military robots which are literally 6-foot-tall rectangles which have to do this sort of weird shuffle in order to move around, except for in emergencies when they turn into crazy spinning asterisks.
  • IMAX sequences which look like, well, the movies, intercut with non-IMAX sequences which are soft & smeary & look in places like Super16 blown up to 35.

Basically, it’s like a semi-incoherent mashup of 2001, Contact, and Gravity, and you’d be much better off renting those three movies & watching them. Or heck, watch Europa Report. It’s not a perfect movie, but it asks some interesting questions & it does so in about half the time & for 1/100th the budget.

It occurred to me in retrospect that I haven’t really thoroughly enjoyed a Christopher Nolan movie since Memento. He’s such a technician. I think about all these people trying to keep track of the layers in Inception, but I can’t remember anyone really giving a shit about the actual characters & their interactions. Likewise here; everyone is more or less alone in this movie, communicating via narrowband across great distances.

After the movie it took 45 minutes to get out of the parking lot of Southpoint. 

Had dinner at Metro 8, which actually produces quite a respectable steak, and treats its vegetable side dishes with respect as well. I’d be leery of its non-beef offerings, but it’s actually kind of a useful ace in the hole for a last-minute Saturday dinner out.

November 8, 2014

November 2, 2014

I don’t think I slept for an extra hour, but I still woke up feeling extra rested, so that’s pretty awesome. But that fleeting moment of restfulness by no means outweighed the hours/days of angst in the spring when the clocks go the other direction.

Sunday Times. Somehow I had missed that the same director, JC Chandor, had made, in fairly rapid succession, Margin Call and All Is Lost. His first two films. Not too shabby, dude.

Speaking of Big Holiday Movies (were we? We were, technically), I realized that I’ve basically only seen every-other Christopher Nolan movie. M refuses to watch his 3rd Batman movie, but it seems like we might at least be able to hit Insomnia & The Prestige before venturing forth later this week to see Interstellar. In IMAX, the first time I will have made the effort to do that since that 2nd Batman movie, which was so not worth it.

I was ~6 years old when Star Wars came out. I wonder whether people who are even 10 years older than I am have the same subconscious, nearly-instinctive urge to assume that every new bigass sci-fi movie is going to be the one to finally Get It Right Again. By now I have been burned so many times more often than I have been rewarded, but still that little voice keeps bubbling away excitedly.

In prepping for my show, I was reminded that Corrosion of Conformity’s big 5-person “Blind”-era lineup is reuniting this coming Sunday to play a show at the Lincoln Theatre in Raleigh. I pulled the album out & played a track on the air – sadly not “Vote With a Bullet,” since I don’t recall the locations of the profanity accurately enough to edit it on the fly.

It’s still kind of terrible.

It came out in November of 1991, 3 months after Metallica’s Black Album, and just 6 weeks after Nevermind. It’s funny, given what the previous two COC records sounded like, that Blind sounds so much more like the Black Album than Nevermind.

It’d take me a long time to write anything meaningful about COC, I think, since I’d need to talk about hardcore in NC and SC in the 80s, and about the ins & outs of the 23 years since Blind, and honestly I don’t really care enough about them anymore to bother. I lost track of them when I went off to college post-Technocracy, and when I moved to Raleigh in ‘92, they were just this different band with the same name, is all.

Things have been weirder since then, but it’s honestly still kinda easier to keep them categorized that way in my brain.

November 2, 2014