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.

IMDb link

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

Tim’s Vermeer (***1/2)

A warning: this movie may well make you feel like a not-too-bright slacker. Tim Jenison is no slacker and is very smart. At home with seemingly any piece of machinery, he and his company NewTek are responsible for a series of video production innovations that the film breezily runs through. This documentary, directed by the Teller and narrated by his partner-in-magic, Penn Jillette, is pretty breezy in general, so right away we are introduced to its primary thesis. That is, the Dutch master Jan Vermeer used a mechanical device to create his paintings, allowing them to achieve a near-photographic level of realism unlike that of his predecessors or contemporaries.

Like many a magician, Vermeer did not, apparently, leave records behind detailing his tricks. But a few art experts, like David Hockney, thought he had one. Jenison, not an artist, had a hunch what it was. He first shows us the trick, which, to simplify, involves the use of a mirror to project an image in such a way that the painter can, accurately if slowly, copy it onto a canvas. Then, more difficult, he employs it himself. Then, still more difficult, he seeks to re-create Vermeer’s The Music Lesson using materials available to Vermeer in the 1660s,
in rented San Antonio garage.

Unlike Vermeer, who presumably did not actually build the chair or the room seen in his painting, Jenison had to construct both before beginning. Learning Dutch to read old documents was also not an impediment. And that’s before he puts brush to canvas, day after day. This kind of fierce determination is as astonishing as the proposition that someone else might have painted this way 350 years ago. Along the way, Jenison points out features of the painting consistent with that proposition. He’s pretty convincing.

This is an ideal story to tell cinematically; what would have been hard to understand in text is made easily comprehensible with the visual element. In the end, the film leaves us with what I call the Milli Vanilli question. (For the pop-music-history impaired, this musical duo caused an uproar in 1990 when the public learned that they had not performed the music on their records.) That is, should learning how something was (probably) created change your perception of its quality? Jenison, and Penn and Teller, argue against the idea that technology cannot be art; in effect, they say, whatever makes us full of wonder is wonderful.

IMDb link

viewed 3/11/14 7:30 at Ritz Bourse and posted 3/12/14
 

Safety Not Guaranteeed (***1/4)

One of the most original comedies in recent years, wherein an ad seeking a companion for time travel provokes the interest of three journalists, is also one of the funniest. The first feature for its writer (Derek Connolly) and director (Colin Trevorrow), it’s also the first lead role for Aubrey Plaza of Parks and Recreation. If you’ve seen the actress on that NBC show, her intern character, Darius, here will seem familiar. Projecting an unusual combination of sarcasm and sincerity, she’s the mistress of deadpan humor. When a potential employer, a restaurant, asks Darius whether she’d ever gone out of her way to do a little extra at a previous job, she simply says no. She’s equally unenthusiastic about her unpaid position at Seattle magazine, but agrees to tag along when one of the staff members (Jake Johnson, of New Girl) heads to a nearby town to see if the ad is for real. Another intern (Karan Soni) is the trio’s third member, a somewhat stereotypically introverted Indian guy.

 

Mark Duplass plays Kenneth, the guy who placed the ad, who will need to be persuaded to pick someone from the team as his companion. The boss makes the first pitch, but doesn’t pass the test—including questions like “Have you faced certain death”— because he’s kind of an ass. So the intern tries her hand. When asked the crucial question, she says if she’d faced certain death she wouldn’t be there. Kenneth is meant to be off-kilter but sympathetic, and so the snarkiness of the beginning of the film (and the Darius character) gives way to something more sincere while remaining funny. A covert operation to procure supplies becomes a brief but hilarious parody of suspense films.

The ending was not what I expected, and I had mixed feelings about it, but it was in keeping with a comedy that has a cynical shell and a romantic interior.

IMDb link

viewed 6/7/12 7:30 pm [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/8–6/24/12

The Skin I Live In (***1/4)

This film’s plot should seem as ridiculous as bad plastic surgery; perhaps only Pedro Almodóvar could make it so compulsively watchable. Almodóvar never truly repeats himself yet makes movies that are somehow of a piece. Adapting a novel by Thierry Jonquet, he edges into science fiction territory—his main character (Antonio Banderas) is a surgeon specializing in face transplants and, yes, lab-grown skin—but inside of ten minutes the plot veers into more familiar themes. For Almodóvar, those include obsessive characters who follow their emotions to questionable ends. The surgeon’s own backstory unspools in a one-minute discourse by his housekeeper (Marisa Paredes) that replaces what might have been a 20-minute flashback in some other director’s hands.

The housekeeper is not just the housekeeper, having a history with her employer, and the young woman to whom she’s unspooling (Elena Anaya), the surgeon’s experimental subject, is not just an experimental subject, but we have to wait until well into the movie to learn who she is, how the doctor came to be keeping her locked away in his house, and how she got the burn scars that the doctor is erasing with his artificial skin. The movie’s title emphasizes identity, a theme of many an Almodóvar melodrama, though not in the same way as here. It’s full of the arresting visuals—the girl’s body suit, especially—for which Almodóvar is known. And it’s full of actors familiar from the director’s other work. Banderas had played other obsessive characters in films such as Matador and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Paredes had starred or costarred in four Almodóvar films, including All About my Mother; and Anaya had appeared in Talk to Her. What it’s not is moving; the fast-paced melodrama will suck you in, and your allegiance will shift among the characters, but for all it’s plotting, there’s not enough history to these characters to make us care about them, or perhaps the story is just too creepy for it to be that kind of movie.

Definitely worth watching for Almodóvar fans, but maybe not the place to start, unless you have a taste for something a little twisted. And a pretty good twist it is.

IMDB link

viewed 11/23/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/23/11

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.


IMDB link


viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 7/31/11

The Fountain (**)

? Darren Aronofsky (π, Requiem for a Dream) wrote and directed this ambitious film that centers around a doctor (Hugh Jackman) frantically trying to save his sick wife (Rachel Weisz) but also has segments set centuries in the past and future. Inspired by (according to news articles) the Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mayan mythology, and his parents’ cancer diagnoses, Aronofsky has created a philosophical work about death and rebirth and the idea of the eternal.

+ What most unites Aronofsky’s three features is their distinct visual styles. Even people who hate this movie (and there will be some) will marvel at its stunning visuals, which look computer generated but mostly weren’t. Most prominent are the future segments, which, I learned from reading, are supposed to be in the 26th-century but could just as well be in Aronofsky’s vision of heaven, or some fantasy world. A unique chemical process is responsible for many of these images, many of which show a tree that looks like copper with swirling branches. Abandoning the quick editing style that was prominent in Requiem for a Dream, Aronofsky induces feelings of calmness here. The scenes in the 16th century are mostly dark and dirty, the ones in the present are insular and sedate, and the future ones are simply other-worldly. The actors are able to successfully tackle taking on very different personalities in the different parts, and also look different. Weisz is a regal queen in one part and a fragile writer in another. The scenes of her and Jackman together in the present-day setting are tender and intimate. (Weisz looks like she isn’t wearing makeup.)

- For me this didn’t quite work. I had the same feeling about it as π, which I admired for its heady mixture of science and philosophy but thought was too incoherent to warm to. I don’t necessarily want to be told what to think about a movie, but it’d be nice to know what the filmmaker was thinking. The idea of the movie could be that the actors are reincarnated, that they are metaphorically able to live forever, or something else, but there is too much that seems arbitrary about how the different parts of the movie fit together, and too much that seems extraneous. It’s hard to say why I didn’t like this movie more, but I think I just was not able to fit everything together in a satisfying way. There’s a lot of repeated motifs that also may make the movie seem slow for a lot of people.

= ** I heard a woman say, “I’m glad this was free,” as I walked out of the screening, and I think a lot of people will share her feeling. At the same time, I think a certain type of person will want to watch The Fountain again and theorize about what it means. Those who enjoyed the Matrix trilogy but thought it could have done without all of those action scenes, for example, may find much that’s intriguing. People of certain types of spiritual beliefs may find the movie a beautiful reflection of them. I’m a more literal-minded person and probably would have liked The Fountain better if it was a more straightforward science fiction film, set in the present day, about a guy trying to prevent aging.

IMDb link

viewed at PFS screening