The Theory of Everything (***1/4)

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This movie is probably slightly better if you don’t know about Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne). For those who do, the story should seem familiar. Covering roughly 25 years, it can only sketch in broad outline Hawking’s major life events — the diagnosis (ALS), the dissertation (on black holes), the debilitation, and the devilishly difficult bestselling book (A Brief History of Time) that made him a household name. Perhaps less familiar will be the love story that director James Marsh focuses on. The movie is in fact based on Jane Hawking’s book.

It’s a story that truly begins after a typical romantic story ends. The scenes in which Stephen, a doctoral student at Cambridge with some unexplained physical lapses, courts Jane (Felicity Jones) are charming — Stephen’s offbeat posture, sly wit, and (later-useful) economy of expression are already apparent — but a prelude. It’s one thing to pledge fidelity to a sick man and another to become the sole caregiver for an invalid who almost literally cannot lift a finger to help around the house.

In all long-term arrangements, the romantic must make room for the domestic. This is that ordinary story, combined with the extraordinary intelligence of Hawking and the fact that time, Hawking’s special area of interest, is not his friend. His speech increasingly slurring, his movements increasingly limited, he yet defies the survival odds. It’s thus an inspirational story that, nonetheless, suggests at once the horror of such a disease and the magnitude of the gift Jane gave him. Marsh, gently eliding over the decades, doesn’t peer deep into the souls of his characters but movingly portrays the way their relationship changes with time, perhaps not as expected. The actors are very good, with Redmayne utterly convincing in evoking the entire range of Hawking’s physical decline, then using his eyebrows to convey emotion and thought. Those interested in more than the barest outline of Hawking’s ideas will want to turn to his books, or Errol Morris’s documentary version of A Brief History of Time, but this is a fine general-interest drama that avoid the clichés of disease movies.

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viewed 11/5/14 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 11/6/14

Particle Fever (***)

It takes the world’s largest machine to study the world’s smallest things. As large as a five-story building, the Large Hadron Collider was constructed in an underground tunnel over a 20-year period near the Geneva headquarters of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). (A similar project in Texas had been defunded midway through construction.) The idea was to smash subatomic particles together in a simulation of conditions present in the first moments after the Big Bang, with the hope that doing so would produce the long-hypothesized Higgs boson, which in turn would confirm scientific theories that had been coalescing since the early 1960s.

Make sense? Not to worry, this documentary leaves the hardest science in background shots of equations on chalkboards, focusing instead on the “particle fever” of the scientists who have, in many cases, waited decades for their ideas to be confirmed (or shot down). To be sure, there is some talk about the Higgs particle and what it means, but more about the “fever” of the scientists. Director Mark Levinson picks half a dozen of them to follow, most prominently Americans David Kaplan and Monica Dunford. Representing the theoretical side of physics, Kaplan provides, among other things, a really clear explanation of the multiverse, the still-speculative idea that our universe is one of many, each with a different set of fundamental properties. Dunford is a super-enthusiastic graduate student who’s more involved with the practical side of things.

Of course, “practical” is meant in a relative sense here. The most amazing thing about the giant Collider may be that billions of dollars were spent on it without the certainty that it would produce anything other than knowledge for its own sake, though also proof that thousands of people from dozens of countries could cooperate to figure out answers to the most fundamental scientific questions.

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viewed 3/29/14 1:05 pm at Ritz Bourse and posted 3/30/14

Source Code (***1/2)

Imagine waking up on a Chicago-bound train with no idea how you got there or why the unfamiliar young lady (Michelle Monaghan) next to you seems to know you, but by another name. That’s what happens to the character played by Jake Gyllenhaal here, and it’s not a story about amnesia, but something else entirely. Perhaps he, a pilot who fought in Afghanistan, doesn’t remember because it’s not real. Perhaps the next people he speaks to, after everything disappears, an Air Force captain (Vera Farmiga) and a government scientist (Jeffrey Wright) who appear on a video screen, will explain. I won’t, because it’s better not to know.

This sci-fi thriller, a first feature for its screenwriter, Ben Ripley, is the second for its director, Duncan Jones, whose film Moon also dealt with artificial intelligence, alienation, and trust, but in a much quieter way. It may remind viewers of movies like Inception or The Matrix, with its plot involving virtual worlds, but also Groundhog Day, in that way it craftily telescopes myriad variations of the same scenario into a concise narrative. (Oddly, Gyllenhaal starred in another movie in which time gets recycled, Donnie Darko.) Obviously, it’s no comedy, but it maintains a lighter feel than those other sci-fi films (or than Moon) while carefully maintaining an internal logic that leads to a fairly satisfying outcome.



IMDB link

viewed 3/23/11 at Rave UPenn [PFS screening with director Q&A] and reviewed 3/23/11 and 1/21/12

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (***1/4)

Until close to the end of this movie, you might be wondering what a small sci-fi film about a scientist (James Franco) and his genetically modified chimp Caesar (Andy Serkis) has to do with the old film series in which an entire world of intelligent chimps rule over humans. But you’ll keep watching anyway.

Like so many films about scientists, this may be deplored by real one because even the relatively kind protagonist played by Franco comes off as a reckless fool. (His boss is also money-grubbing.) (Unlike Contagion, it also sticks with the usual depiction of scientists as lone geniuses rather than collaborators.) It’s also, essentially, the usual Garden of Eden-inspired morality play about scientists meddling in arenas where they don’t belong. And it’s an allegory about human cruelty that’s only slightly less heavy-handed than, say, Avatar, another film in which the humans are, allowing a few grudging exceptions, the villains. (This criticism is purely a dramatic one; the recent documentary Project Nim shows, in fascinating and sometimes heartbreaking fashion, that, for chimps in capitivity, humans really are, allowing a few grudging exceptions, villains.)

But the saving graces are two. First, it doesn’t confer upon apes some kind of spiritual purity. Instead, the film gives us, in Caesar, chimpanzee as warm and cuddly friend (like Spielberg’s E.T.), then (as Spielberg does with his robot in A.I.) yanks the curtain away from that sentimental view, then kind of balances it out, granting the non-human primates their, for lack of a better word, humanity. Second, unlike the the original Planet of the Apes (1968), or the misbegotten film of the same name from 2001, this is more in the vein of a modest thriller than some sort of epic. Somehow, when I don’t feel like the filmmaker is trying to make a grand statement, I am less inclined to quibble that a non-genentically modified orangutan is supposed to be able to have a complex discussion with Caesar simply because he too was once taught sign language. Or that the scientist’s apparently bright girlfriend can’t figure out in five years that Caesar might not be an ordinary ape.

This Rise, then, is a probably fantastic, but still entertaining extrapolation of the idea of what might happen if these creatures who are so similar to us, yet so much more powerful, got smarter. With the help of Serkis (repeating his motion-captured acting from Lord of the Rings), director Rupert Wyatt creates some arresting visuals to accompany the action-oriented second half of the film. The script from the team of Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa (An Eye for an Eye, The Relic) apes (pun intended) E.T. and probably any number of other films, but the originality of having a non-human central character mostly compensates.

IMDB link

viewed 9/15/11 at UA Riverview and reviewed 9/16/11

Project Nim (***1/2)

I had heard the story of the chimpanzee Nim Chimsky. Born in 1973, he was the subject of an experiment whose ostensible purpose was to see if a chimp raised like a human child would develop basic language skills. As fascinating as that question is, the story of what happened to Nim as an individual is equally so, and certainly both stranger and, at times, disturbing. The decision to place Nim in a New York City apartment with a caretaker— a former student of the researcher living with half a dozen kids—who knew nothing about chimps and little about sign language is only the first of the odd events. She was, however, willing to treat him so like one of her own young children that she breast fed him. And yet, he would be taken from her.

There are several more stops on Nim’s odyssey, and while the jury is still out on how much language apes can acquire—a question explored more in Elizabeth Hess’s book than in this adaptation—it’s hard to come away from this movie with good feelings toward primate experimentation. Yet the tone director James Marsh takes is as even as that in his previous documentary, Man on Wire. He has the benefit of having nearly every person important to the story participating in his film, though most of the story is at a 30 year remove. This includes Herb Terrace, the researcher who oversaw Project Nim, as well as the humans who bonded with Nim. Since Nim was the subject of the scientific research, Marsh also has period footage of Nim, whose signing is helpfully translated on screen.

In the end, Nim shows himself to share many human qualities, but the film also shows that to be not entirely a flattering comparison.


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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 7/31/11

Splice (**1/2)

Coming barely a week after Craig Venter’s announcement that his team had created a synthetic bacteria from man-made DNA, this release is nothing if not timely. One day, its premise that a couple of pharmaceutical company researchers (Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley) could combine human and animal DNA into a new creature may become quite plausible. And yet, should that happen, it's certain not to be like this.

As sci-fi, Splice is weak. You would think with the wealth of new information on DNA that there would be more science in a movie like this. We never find out what got spliced with the human DNA, but apparently it’s whatever’s required by any given scene. The two scientists—named Clive and Elsa after the actors in Bride of Frankenstein—are supposed to be brilliant, but their scientific process seems akin to mixing up a witch’s potion. Even they’re surprised, several times, by their own creation, which grows into something, or someone, looking like a little girl with a tail and chicken legs. This actually looks better on screen than it sounds.

As for the human elements in the movie, I can imagine that real scientists will groan at the usual Hollywood portrait of arrogance, impulsiveness, and seeming disregard for moral implications. In fact, the film does try to grapple with ethical issues—the meaning of humanity, the responsibilities of scientists, even, indirectly, abortion—but does so clumsily. Elsa especially veers from cool rationality to overt emotionality and back again, but Clive also has some abrupt shifts in character. Brody and Polley, an actress and director who’s stayed under the American radar by sticking to Canadian productions (like this one, filmed in Ontario), do their best. But by the end, it’s hard to tell who's nuttier, Elsa, Clive, or cowriter-director Vincenzo Natali. Natali would have be better off not to compress the story into such a short time frame, or, alternately, not to have so much happen so quickly. Steven Spielberg’s A.I. takes a similarly kitchen-sink approach to a sort of similar theme (though it’s about robots), but by having the story happen over a long period makes it seem philosophical.

I have to admit, Splice is a lot of fun for a bad movie. It’s not a straight horror movie, and is rarely gory, but there are a number of very creepy scenes. So it may be that horror fans, particularly fans of old monster movies, will enjoy it. (The effects are a lot better than in many of those old horror films.) Frankenstein is one obvious inspiration. But James Whale’s original film has a poignancy to it, and Splice just seems silly. A key scene in the movie produced both gasps and laughs. Coming early in the second half of the movie, it signals the moment where the story goes off the rails. Like most train wrecks, it’s not dull. But in this case, less would have been more.

IMDB link

viewed 6/1/10 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/2–4/10

Encounters at the End of the World (***)

Werner Herzog has made a career out of depicting man confronting the extreme. His recent work includes Grizzly Man, a documentary about a man killed by the creatures he sought to protect, and Rescue Dawn, the Christian Bale-starring POW drama. In Antarctica, those with a taste for the extreme congregate. Here, the only continent where Herzog had not made a movie, he finds scientists as well as those doing the more mundane work that supports them.

IMDB link

viewed 7/16/08; reviewed 8/5/08

Meet the Robinsons (***1/4)

? An animated Disney film about a orphaned science geek who dreams of finding out about his past but gets side-tracked by the future. Based on the book A Day with Wilbur Robinson by William Joyce.
+ Visual invention and conceptual imagination are all over the place. The plot hinges on the boy’s attempt to invent a device to look back in time, and while that’s a fanciful idea, it’s appealing too. Futuristic flying machines, a talking bowler hat that’s smarter than its wearer (the nominal villain), and genetically altered, singing frogs are all part of the story. Thematically, the message of the movie is to follow your inner goofball.
- So much is happening all at once that some people mind find all the zaniness overwhelming, and the youngest kids will probably get lost in all of the Back to the Future type contradictions.
= ***1/4 On the whole, a lot of fun.

IMDB link

reviewed 4/6/07