Tag: Christopher Nolan

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Southeastern Film Critics Association Names Best Films of 2023

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)

The 89 members of the Southeastern Film Critics Association (SEFCA) have named Oppenheimer as the best film of 2024 in their annual poll.

“2023 will be remembered by many as the year that featured the commercial, critical, and cultural phenomenon known as Barbenheimer,” says SEFCA Vice President Jim Farmer. But it was also a season that offered a stunning amount of high-quality films, with master filmmakers near the top of their games, fresher faces making strong impressions, and performers showing new dimensions. It was a pleasure to take in all that 2023 had to offer.”

Oppenheimer proved to be an overwhelming favorite with the critics, who awarded Christopher Nolan Best Director laurels. The entire acting ensemble was honored, Cillian Murphy earned Best Actor for his portrayal of the father of the atomic bomb, and Robert Downey Jr. won Best Supporting Actor. Hoyt Van Hoytema was recognized for Best Cinematography, and Ludwig Goransson for Best Score.

“This fall featured three big films from three grandmasters of cinema,” says SEFCA President Scott Phillips. “Martin Scorsese released Killers of the Flower Moon. Ridley Scott brought
Napoleon to the big screen and Michael Mann hits theaters next week with Ferrari. Despite this bumper crop from heavy-hitting auteurs, Christopher Nolan’s film from six months ago is walking away with eight SEFCA awards. Oppenheimer is a stunning cinematic achievement. Our members recognized that in July, and they are rewarding it in December.”

Here is the complete slate of 2023 awards from SEFCA:

Top 10 Films of 2023

  1. Oppenheimer
  2. Killers of the Flower Moon
  3. The Holdovers
  4. Past Lives
  5. Barbie
  6. Poor Things
  7. American Fiction
  8. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
  9. Anatomy of a Fall
  10. The Zone of Interest

Best Actor

Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer

Best Actress
Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon

Best Supporting Actor
Robert Downey, Jr., Oppenheimer

Best Supporting Actress
Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers

Best Ensemble
Oppenheimer

Best Director

Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer

Best Original Screenplay
David Hemingson, The Holdovers

Best Adapted Screenplay
Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer

Best Animated Film

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Best Documentary
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

Best Foreign-Language Film
Anatomy of a Fall

Best Cinematography
Hoyt Van Hoytema, Oppenheimer

Best Score
Ludwig Goransson, Oppenheimer

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Barbenheimer

Why pick Barbie or Oppenheimer when you can do both?

It began as an internet joke. Barbie and Oppenheimer were both scheduled to open on July 21st. Wouldn’t it be weird to watch both of them back-to-back?

Counter-programming is a long tradition among film distributors. Whenever there’s a big “boy” movie, like The Dark Knight, someone with a “girl” movie, like Mamma Mia!, will schedule it for release the same weekend. The theory behind “Dark Mamma” (which really happened in 2008) is that maybe girlfriends and grandmas who are not into Batman can be scraped off of a family outing by the promise of something they would actually like.

By that logic, the hot pink good cheer of Barbie is the perfect foil for the dark, brooding Oppenheimer. No one expected the audience reaction to be “Let’s do both!” Maybe that’s because the studio execs’ conception of who their audiences are and what they want is deeply flawed and out-of-date.

On the surface, the two films couldn’t be more different. But there are a lot of parallels. Both Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig are writer/directors with exceptional track records. Both got essentially free rein to do what they wanted. In Nolan’s case, it was because Universal wanted to lure him away from Warner Bros. In Gerwig’s case, the film was greenlit just before the pandemic and Warner Bros.’ takeover by Discovery. In the chaos, executives focused on rescuing The Flash, and no one cared enough about “the girl movie” to interfere with Gerwig’s vision.

Both films are, relatively speaking, mid-budget. Nolan kept the ship tight at $100 million; Gerwig ended up spending $145 million. For comparison, Marvel films can’t even roll camera for less than $200 million, and Warner Bros. will lose $200 million on The Flash alone. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny cost an eye-watering $295 million after Covid delays.

More unexpected parallels emerge on screen. Both main characters face a reckoning for what they brought into the world. In J. Robert Oppenheimer’s case, it’s the atomic bomb. In Barbie’s case, it’s unrealistic expectations of female perfection.

In her Memphis Flyer review of Barbie, Kailynn Johnson writes, “The idea of a doll visiting the real world and learning to adjust to a life that’s not so fantastic was always in the cards for Barbie — the 2000 movie Life-Size starring Tyra Banks walked so Gerwig could run with Barbie. As she is catcalled by construction workers in Venice Beach, Barbie realizes misogyny did not end with Supreme Court Barbie. She suffers an existential crisis when she realizes that her very brand is determined by an all-male team led by Mr. Mattel (Will Ferrell). … Gerwig uses Barbie to explore the nuances of feminism, but the film never feels too heavy or takes itself too seriously. She carefully sandwiches some of the deeper moments with satire. It helps that Mattel isn’t afraid to laugh at itself.”

Barbie may have benefitted from low expectations from those who were unfamiliar with Gerwig’s near-perfect filmography, but expectations couldn’t have been higher for Nolan, the inheritor of Stanley Kubrick’s “Very Serious Filmmaker” mantle. Big, complex, and messy, Oppenheimer doesn’t lack for ambition. I wrote in my review, “The Trinity bomb test, which comes about two hours into this three-hour epic, is a near-silent tour de force of fire and portent. The scientists’ queasy victory party, held in a cramped Los Alamos gymnasium, may be the best single scene Nolan has ever done. … If only the whole movie were that great.”

The weekend box office results exceeded everyone’s expectations. Barbie raked in $162 million domestically — the biggest opening haul of the year, and the biggest ever by a female director. Oppenheimer did $82 million, a stunning result for a talky three-hour movie about nuclear physics. Overall, it was the fourth-largest grossing weekend in film history.

Viewers who rolled their own Barbenheimer double feature on some internet dare to experience the most intense psychic whiplash possible found two well-made movies, each with their own voice and something to say. Instead of competition, these two films have lifted each other up and inspired real conversation. The tribal question of “which one is better?” has, so far, been secondary. (It’s Barbie, FWIW.)

In Hollywood, unexpected success is more upsetting than unexpected failure. The public’s embrace of original, creative, filmmaker-driven pictures over legacy franchises systematically drained of originality by cowardly executives is now undeniable. As the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes grind on, and the studios plot to break the creatives’ will, audiences have sent a clear message about who is necessary and who is expendable.

Barbenheimer (Barbie + Oppenheimer)
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Oppenheimer

Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer.

Geologists divide time into epochs, which can last tens of millions of years. The end of one epoch and the beginning of another is marked by clearly definable features in the geological record, such as the layer of extraterrestrial iridium laid down at the end of the Cretaceous by the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs. All of human history has taken place in the Holocene epoch, but recently, the effects of climate change and industrial society have led scientists to the conclusion that we are living in a new epoch. The Anthropocene is defined as the time when human actions became more important to the state of planet Earth than natural activity. The Anthropocene’s beginning is represented by a layer of radioactive fallout from Cold War atomic bomb tests which will remain visible in the soil and rocks for millions of years. 

The first atomic bomb was detonated in New Mexico in July, 1945, and the man history calls its father is J. Robert Oppenheimer. He was a brilliant physicist who had led a titanic effort to win a war by harnessing the very essence of the universe. Twenty years later, as the growing nuclear arsenals of the United States and the USSR threatened humanity with mass extinction, Oppenheimer was interviewed on television about what it was like when his bomb went off. He said he remembered a quote from Hindu scripture: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” 

Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is about how a person can go from the pinnacle of scientific achievement to a hollowed-out husk of a man trying to atone for the evil he unleashed on the world. The three-hour epic, shot on IMAX film stock specially formulated for the task, is ostensibly based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. But Nolan owes a conceptual debt to Michael Frayn’s Tony-award-winning drama Copenhagen. Frayn used repetition and multiple points of view to tell the story of a fateful conversation between physicist Werner Heisenberg, head of the Nazi nuclear program, and his mentor Niels Bohr, who was about to flee to the United States.

Nolan takes us through Oppenheimer’s rise and fall from two different points of view: One POV, titled “Fission,” is Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) defending his life choices to a committee which would ultimately revoke his security clearances and end his career. The other POV, titled “Fusion” is Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey, Jr.), the first Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, as he faces a Senate confirmation hearing to become Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. Fission, which covers Oppenhimer’s chaotic personal life and the development of the bomb, is in color, while Fusion, which details the anti-Communist witch hunt which destroyed him, is in black and white. 

In the color memories, Murphy embodies the quiet, enigmatic charisma described by those who followed Oppenheimer into the darkness of Los Alamos. In the creamy black and white of Fusion, he becomes the skeletal embodiment of the industrial death machine. Downey is unrecognizable as the duplicitous social climber Strauss. Matt Damon is outstanding as Gen. Leslie Groves, the back-slapping Army Corps of Engineers officer who is in way over his head overseeing the Manhattan Project. Jason Clarke gives the performance of his life as Roger Robb, the attack dog prosecutor who exposes Oppenheimer’s darkest secrets. 

Nolan’s always had problems writing female characters, so the women don’t have much to work with. Emily Blunt is all drunken hysterics as Kitty Oppenheimer. Florence Pugh puts up a good fight as Jean Tatlock, Oppenheimer’s doomed Communist mistress. 

The Trinity bomb test, which comes about two hours into this three-hour epic, is a near-silent tour de force of fire and portent. The scientist’s queasy victory party, held in a cramped Los Alamos gymnasium, may be the best single scene Nolan has ever done.  

If only the whole movie were that great. Oppenheimer is both too long and has too many cuts—a cinematic quantum paradox! At times, Nolan seems acutely aware that he’s making a movie about a bunch of weirdos writing equations on blackboards for years on end. He tries to spice things up by editing dense conversations about physics, philosophy, and politics like frenetic action sequences. In one gorgeous shot, we see Oppenheimer finally alone with The Gadget that will define a new geological epoch. It should be the tense calm before the storm, but Nolan and editor Jennifer Lame bury that gold in a blizzard of mediocre images. I found myself wishing Ludwig Göransson’s relentless, pounding score would just chill for a minute. The nonlinear structure that works so well in Copenhagen hobbles the forward momentum, and makes the complex story even more confusing.

Oppenhiemer is a return to form for Nolan after the fiasco of Tenet. There’s a great movie hiding amidst all of the formal pyrotechnics. But I guess it’s too much to ask for a lighter touch from a director who is about as subtle as an atomic bomb.

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2020 on Screen: The Best and Worst of Film and TV

There’s no denying that 2020 was an unprecedented year, so I’m doing something unprecedented: combining film and TV into one year-end list.

Steve Carrell sucking up oxygen in Space Force.

Worst TV: Space Force

Satirizing Donald Trump’s useless new branch of the military probably seemed like a good idea at the time. But Space Force is an aggressively unfunny boondoggle that normalizes the neo-fascism that almost swallowed America in 2020.

John David Washington (center) and Robert Pattinson (right) are impeccably dressed secret time agents in Tenet.

Worst Picture: Tenet

Christopher Nolan’s latest gizmo flick was supposed to save theaters from the pandemic. Instead, it was an incoherent, boring, self-important mess. You’d think $200 million would buy a sound mix with discernible dialogue. I get angry every time I think about this movie.

We Can’t Wait

Best Memphis Film: We Can’t Wait

Lauren Ready’s Indie Memphis winner is a fly-on-the-wall view of Tami Sawyer’s 2019 mayoral campaign. Unflinching and honest, it’s an instant Bluff City classic.

Grogu, aka The Child, aka Baby Yoda

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Grogu, The Mandalorian

In this hotly contested category, Baby Yoda barely squeaks out a win over Buck from Call of the Wild. Season 2 of the Star Wars series transforms The Child by calling his presumed innocence into question, transforming the story into a battle for his soul.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton

Most Inspiring: Hamilton

The year’s emotional turning point was the Independence Day Disney+ debut of the Broadway mega-hit. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop retelling of America’s founding drama called forth the better angels of our nature.

Film About a Father Who

Best Documentary: Film About a Father Who

More than 35 years in the making, Lynne Sachs’ portrait of her mercurial father, legendary Memphis bon vivant Ira Sachs Sr., is as raw and confessional as its subject is inscrutable. Rarely has a filmmaker opened such a deep vein and let the truth bleed out.

Cristin Milioti in Palm Springs

Best Comedy: Palm Springs

Andy Samberg is stuck in a time loop he doesn’t want to break until he accidentally pulls Cristin Milioti in with him. It’s the best twist yet on the classic Groundhog Day formula, in no small part because of Milioti’s breakthrough performance. It perfectly captured the languid sameness of the COVID summer.

Soul

Best Animation: Soul

Pixar’s Pete Docter, co-directing with One Night in Miami writer Kemp Powers, creates another little slice of perfection. Shot through with a love of jazz, this lusciously animated take on A Matter of Life and Death stars Jamie Foxx as a middle school music teacher who gets his long-awaited big break, only to die on his way to the gig. Tina Fey is the disembodied soul who helps him appreciate that no life devoted to art is wasted.

Jessie Buckley

Best Performance: Jessie Buckley, I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Buckley is the acting discovery of the year. She’s perfect in Fargo as Nurse Mayflower, who hides her homicidal mania under a layer of Midwestern nice. But her performance in Charlie Kaufman’s mind-bending psychological horror is a next-level achievement. She conveys Lucy’s (or maybe it’s Louisa, or possibly Lucia) fluid identity with subtle changes of postures and flashes of her crooked smile.

Isiah Whitlock Jr., Norm Lewis, Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, and Jonathan Majors in Da 5 Bloods.

MVP: Spike Lee

Lee dropped not one but two masterpieces this year. Treasure of the Sierra Madre in the jungle, the kaleidoscopic Vietnam War drama Da 5 Bloods reckons with the legacy of American imperialism with an all-time great performance by Delroy Lindo as a Black veteran undone by trauma, greed, and envy. American Utopia is the polar opposite; a joyful concert film made in collaboration with David Byrne that rocks the body while pointing the way to a better future. In 2020, Lee made a convincing case that he is the greatest living American filmmaker.

Rhea Seehorn and Bob Odenkirk in Better Call Saul

Best TV: Better Call Saul

How could Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s prequel to the epochal Breaking Bad keep getting better in its fifth season? The writing is as sharp as ever, and Bob Odenkirk’s descent from the goofy screwup Jimmy McGill to amoral drug cartel lawyer Saul Goodman is every bit the equal of Bryan Cranston’s transformation from Walter White to Heisenberg. This was the season that Rhea Seehorn came into her own as Kim Wexler. Saul’s superlawyer wife revealed herself as his equal in cunning. If she can figure out what she wants in life, she will be the most dangerous character in a story filled with drug lords, assassins, and predatory bankers.

Michael Stuhlbarg and Elisabeth Moss in Shirley.

Best Picture: Shirley

Elisabeth Moss is brilliant as writer Shirley Jackson in Josephine Decker’s experimental biographical drama. Michael Stuhlbarg co-stars as her lit professor husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, who is at once her biggest fan and bitterest enemy. Into this toxic stew of a relationship is dropped Rose (Odessa Young), the pregnant young wife of Hyman’s colleague Fred (Logan Lerman), who becomes Shirley’s muse/punching bag. If Soul is about art’s life-giving power, Shirley is about art’s destructive dark side. Shirley is too flinty and idiosyncratic to get mainstream recognition, but it’s a stunning, unique vision straight from the American underground.

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Tenet: Christopher Nolan Comes Unstuck in Time

John David Washington (center) and Robert Pattinson (right) are impeccably dressed secret time agents in Tenet.

Entropy increases. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the ironclad rule of physics that most defines our universe. Entropy is a slippery concept. It’s much more complex than “disorder” or “energy flows from hotter objects to colder objects” or just “things fall apart.” The constant, incremental increase in entropy is what defines time itself. Einstein told us that time and space are inseparable, but how come you can move in two directions in the three physical dimensions — forward or backwards, up or down, left or right — but only one way through time — from past to future? Because entropy increases.

Throughout human history, our perspective was trapped in time’s relentless advance. But the invention of the film camera changed that. Very soon after the Lumiére Brothers and Thomas Edison figured out how to simulate motion by quickly flipping through sequential still images, someone had the bright idea to see what it would look like if you ran the pictures backwards. What they saw was something that never happens in nature: entropy decreasing. Broken shards of glass strewn across a floor suddenly rush toward each other, form a vase, and then leap into the air, landing in a waiting hand. Ashes sprout flame and re-form into a log. Waves rebuild sandcastles. Effects come before causes.

Movies have always been obsessed with time. What we film folk refer to as “structure” is really just the order in which events happen in a screenplay. But few filmmakers have been as obsessed with the increase of entropy as Christopher Nolan. His breakthrough film (and, for my money, still the best thing he’s ever done) was 2000’s Memento, a story told backwards to illustrate Guy Pearce’s lack of long-term memory. He loves playing with the rate of time’s passage, as in Inception and Dunkirk. In Tenet, he takes his temporal obsession to new heights.

Tenet begins with a literal overture. An opera house in Kiev, Ukraine, is taken hostage, and a group of CIA special ops troops, led by John David Washington, who is known only as Protagonist, effect a rescue. The bravado sequence is a direct reference to Hitchcock’s famous climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much, and it’s just the first in a movie comprised almost entirely of bravado sequences.

While in the opera house, the CIA team recovers a mysterious artifact. But things go sideways for our meta-named Protagonist, and he ends up the prisoner of a mysterious terrorist group. Rather than talk, he chomps down on a suicide pill, and quickly loses consciousness. Then, he wakes up. The suicide pill was fake, and the operation was part of a test to see if our Protagonist was worthy of joining a super-secret organization called Tenet. Physicist Laura (Clémence Poésy) briefs him on their mission. The mysterious artifact recovered at the opera house is part of an increasing number of objects uncovered worldwide that seem to be moving backwards in time. In other words, their entropy has been reversed. This is as unnatural as it gets, and Protagonist’s mission is to figure out what’s going on.

The search will lead Protagonist and his partner Neil (Robert Pattinson) on a worldwide hunt. Tracing the bullets from a reversed gun leads them to an arms dealer in Mumbai, India, named Priya (Dimple Kapadia) and a Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh). Sator, it seems, is in communication with people from the far future who are understandably pissed off about climate change, and have a twisted time travel-based plot that is not so understandable. If said plot comes to fruition, it will be the end of everything — or maybe the beginning of everything. It’s complicated.

Tenet mashes up the jet-setting glamor of James Bond with the hard science-fiction of Interstellar. Nolan’s script is as high-concept as it gets, and it uses the premise to stage insane sequences like a chase with half the cars going forward in time and half going backwards in time. But clarity is not Nolan’s strong suit, and by the time we get to the Bond-inspired, climactic paramilitary raid on an underground nuclear test site, I was hard-pressed to figure out who was fighting whom, and which direction we were traveling in time.

Nolan’s visual mastery is undeniable, and he gets brownie points for not leaning on CGI. The vast majority of what’s on the screen is staged in real life, and if there was an Oscar for backwards acting (an underappreciated skill that goes back to the silent era), Washington deserves it. But Tenet’s bloodless worldview is best illustrated by the name “Protagonist.” It’s a too-clever in-joke that covers up an active disinterest in the messiness of human emotion. Tenet addresses some important themes, such as the dangers of technology concentrating world-shattering powers in the hands of unaccountable individuals, but it treats the world as an abstraction of physics, not as a real place where real people live. It feels like an essay with explosions.

Tenet: Christopher Nolan Comes Unstuck in Time

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Dunkirk

At this point, Christopher Nolan is a lot like Led Zeppelin. Both the English director of brainy blockbusters and the deans of English classic rock had a talent for big, crowd-pleasing riffs. Nolan dominated the multiplex box office of the aughts and early teens the same way Led Zeppelin dominated album-oriented rock radio in the 1970s. And both Nolan and Zep are taken very seriously by both their fans and themselves.

Nolan and Zeppelin’s technical mastery of their respective forms turned out to be mixed blessings. Jimmy Page had an idiosyncratic style that worked extremely well for him, but as the ’70s gave way to the ’80s, the audience was bombarded by mediocre imitators. Zep was great, but those who came after were not so great, and there were so many of them. Nolan likewise constructed a unique style combining classical technique with modern digital technology. It was great in Inception but not so great when it was regurgitated in The Maze Runner.

Nolan-itis hit the superhero genre especially hard. Somewhere on the backside of the two-hour mark in The Dark Knight Rises, watching a hyper-realistic depiction of a guy dressed like a bat punching out masked terrorists started to get old. But the grimdark wouldn’t die. From Hunger Games to Man of Steel, assaultive mirthlessness was the order of the day. After Nolan hung up the batarang, Warner Brothers wouldn’t make another watchable superhero movie until this year’s Wonder Woman, and even Patty Jenkins’ instant classic lifts the ending from The Dark Knight Rises.

newest feature film, the WWII-era Dunkirk.

Rather than weeping because he had no more worlds to conquer after Interstellar, Nolan decided to go small — only small for Nolan means recreating the Battle of Dunkirk, IMAX-size, with as little CGI as possible. Artistically, it was a good decision. By bringing Dunkirk in at a brisk (for him) 106 minutes, Nolan rediscovers his gift for concision that made his early gems like Memento so pleasing.

Nolan sets up the situation swiftly and nearly wordlessly. It’s May 1940, and Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) is a British soldier retreating from the Nazis in northern France. When his squad is attacked while looting for food and water in the abandoned French port town, he is left as the only survivor. Looking to find a place to relieve himself, he stumbles onto the vast beach where tens of thousands of British troops are waiting for rescue from the German blitzkrieg. For a moment, the assembled might of an army waiting to go home looks imposing, but once the German dive bombers arrive, their true vulnerability is revealed.

In real life, 400,000 British and French soldiers were trapped on the beach until an ad hoc flotilla comprised of practically every seaworthy vessel in the British Isles sailed to the rescue. Nolan’s cast isn’t quite that big, but I don’t envy the extras wranglers who had to find places for everyone to relieve themselves on the French beach. Like Spielberg, Nolan has an almost Soviet talent for visualizing great movements of people. There is no lead actor, per se, in this film. Nolan’s screenplay follows three groups: Tommy and his mysterious comrade Gibson, who repeatedly try and fail to get off the beach; the crew of the Moonstone, a modest pleasure vessel captained by Mr. Dawson (Mark Rylance) who volunteers to ferry soldiers across the channel; and a flight of Spitfires, led by Tom Hardy, whose numbers dwindle as they try to keep the Luftwaffe busy while the evacuation proceeds. The three storylines proceed linearly but at radically different paces until they all come together for a finale above, on, and below the English Channel.

Aside from Rylance’s warm humanity and Cillian Murphy as a shivering PTSD case, the characterization is paper thin, but the plotting and editing is as tight as is expected from Nolan. From balletic dogfight sequences shot with IMAX cameras and real airplanes, to the horror inside a capsizing troop ship, the images he conjures are among the best of his career. There are also moments of almost accidental political relevance, such as when a squad of soldiers in a leaky boat has a miniature version of the Brexit debate, only with guns. Nolan’s vision of war is not sweeping, heroic action and sacrifice. It’s fear, foggy goggles, and ratty comms. The victors are the ones who make it home alive.

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Interstellar

Let’s start with what Christopher Nolan got right in Interstellar, which is a lot. After spending eight or so years making successful, culture-defining Batman movies (with a stop in the dreamtime for 2010’s Inception), he chose to spend his clout making a science-fiction epic in the mold of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s masterpiece, Nolan’s Interstellar is “hard” sci-fi, meaning it relies on known science for its settings and plot points. Until it doesn’t.

The first known science it throws at us is a near future earth ravaged by climate change and the resource wars we are already seeing break out in places like Central Africa and the Levant. Overpopulation is no longer as big a problem as it is today, because six billion people have died, including Cooper’s (Matthew McConaughey) wife. But crops are failing, species are dying, and corn, our last remaining foodstuff, is threatened by a dust borne blight. Cooper, a former star astronaut and aerospace engineer, is now using his talents to build robotic harvesters to keep feeding the starving masses. But then, he receives a strange signal: a location encoded in binary somehow sent through gravity waves to his daughter Murph’s (Mackenzie Foy) bedroom. The location turns out to be a secret NASA base where the world’s remaining space scientists, led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine) are preparing an expedition into a wormhole that unknown alien intelligence has opened near Saturn. Twelve expeditions have gone into the wormhole looking for a planet where humans can relocate to save the species when earth is no longer habitable, which will be within a generation. Three have reported back encouraging results, and Cooper, along with Professor Brand’s daughter (Anne Hathaway), is tasked with diving into the wormhole and finding out which exoplanet is just right for us.

Anne Hathaway in Interstellar

Shot on 70mm film with a pleasing mix of old-fashioned practical effects and digital wizardry, Interstellar is at its best when McConaughey is surfing his spaceship down a water planet’s Everest-sized waves or skirting the event horizon of a black hole called Gargantua that is the most spectacular and accurate image of the astronomical phenomenon ever created. If you’re going to see Interstellar — and if you’re any kind of sci-fi fan you absolutely should — see it on as big a screen as possible to appreciate Nolan’s impeccable craftsmanship.

But it’s too bad the craftsmanship didn’t extend to the script. Nolan’s Batman movies were generally worthy, but they had one too many subplots, an over reliance on coincidence, and characters acting like archetypes instead of human beings. Outside the superhero space, these flaws become glaring. Seemingly afraid of losing some mythical demographic of viewers who came to a space opera to see a father-daughter relationship drama, Nolan can’t go five minutes without repeating that it’s hard to leave your kids behind when you’re on a multi-year deep-space mission to save humanity. Then the (admittedly eye-popping) love-conquers-all ending undermines all that came before.

It boils down to this: Interstellar is 120 minutes of good movie stuffed into 170 minutes.

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Film Retrospective: Batman (1989)

This week, 25 years ago, I was a knot of anticipation. The thing I wanted to see more than any other thing, the Batman film, was at last coming out. I’m not saying I wanted to see Batman more than I wanted to see any other movie at the time; I mean I had never been so eager to partake in anything, ever. In retrospect, I haven’t been so excited for the release of any other piece of pop culture. I think the only things to surpass it are real-life greatnesses: kissing a girl, getting married, the birth of my children. Seriously. (Where are you going? Come back!)

I was so excited in part because I loved and devoured the Batman comics. The character appealed to my maturing sense of identity and growing individualism. He was no less human than I was — he wasn’t bitten by a radioactive spider, exposed to cosmic or gamma rays, or orphaned from an alien planet — infinitely relatable to this here shy little nerd. What made Bruce Wayne into Batman was nothing but a common traumatic childhood; granted, my sheltered, suburban upbringing was far from harrowing. But, if you stabbed Batman with a sword-umbrella, he’d bleed like anyone else, and he became successful by dint of willpower alone. Plus, what kid doesn’t want to hear that it’s the monsters who should be afraid of the dark?

Michael Keaton in Batman

The movie Batman hit me square in the face, at age 13, the summer before 8th grade, a seminal moment at a seminal age. It marked my transition from an artless, prepubescent consumer of whatever happened to be in front of me to a relatively thoughtful observer of craft and commercialism. The coming of age was my (forgive me) Bat Mitzvah.

Batman felt like the first movie that was made for me. I pined for news in the build-up to its release — this was, of course, long before the internet, a lonely place of dying that left one starved for information. I watched Entertainment Tonight routinely, hoping for clips or updates; I scoured for showbiz tidbits in the Appeal section of The Commercial Appeal — this was pre-Captain Comics. Entertainment Weekly didn’t exist yet. MTV ran a “Steal the Batmobile” contest; I obsessed over the glimpses of the movie the promos and commercials showed. When the video to Prince’s “Batdance” premiered in advance of the film’s release, I was devastated: It didn’t show any scenes from the movie.

Finally, Batman came out. I saw it at Highland Quartet, the first showing on the first day. It napalmed me. I could not have loved it more. It buried itself in my DNA instantly. I bought the Danny Elfman score on tape and wore it out. To this day, it’s my all-time favorite soundtrack. I waited on tenterhooks for the box office results, finally delivered (at least, in my recollection) in the voice of Chris Connelly on an MTV News segment: Batman had a huge opening weekend. I felt personally vindicated. (As I said, I was a nerd.)

Batman was my first movie review. I wrote it for myself, in a journal kept in a spiral school notebook that has been, sadly, lost to time. After some attic digging, I did unearth the second volume of my journal, running from August 1989 to December 1990. Included within is my first ever movies list, presented here unadulterated:

Top 15 Movies, 6-29-90, 1:41-1:46 a.m.

1. Batman

2. The Hunt for Red October

3. RoboCop 2

4. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

5. Gremlins 2

6. The Jerk

7. RoboCop

8. Die Hard

9. The Terminator

10. Top Gun

11. The Blues Brothers

12. The Running Man

13. Young Guns

14. Blind Date

15. Parenthood

Looking back, there are plenty of things to commend in Tim Burton’s film. His German Expressionistic sensibilities (and Anton Furst production design) perfectly reflect the shadows of the mind cast within by Bruce Wayne’s psychological scars; Michael Keaton is surprisingly good as Batman; Jack Nicholson is terrific as the Joker. Its reputation was only burnished by the disappointments that followed, with the 1990s sequels Batman Returns, Batman Forever, and Batman & Robin.

However, in 2005, with Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan rendered the 1989 Batman irrelevant — astonishingly, but no less substantively. Nolan and Christian Bale made a grown-up adaptation — textually moodier, with characters more realistically beat down by life’s injustices — that thoroughly neutered the Burton/Keaton “original.”

The one thing missing from Nolan’s update was the childhood sense of awe and joy that I see bursting from the 1989 film. It’s not really Batman Begins‘ fault. How could it have possibly contained and inspired all that life-changing ecstasy? After all, I wasn’t there to provide it.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Sweet Thereafter

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Memphis Flyer (our first quarter quell, as it were), I have chosen my personal favorite film from each year since the Flyer began publication. Then, for each of those films, I unearthed and have excerpted some quotes from the review we ran at the time. — Greg Akers

1989: #1 Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch (#2 Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee)

“While all the scenes in Mystery Train are identifiable by anyone living west of Goodlett, their geographical relationship gets altered to a point where we start to trust Jarmusch more than our own memories.” — Jim Newcomb, March 8, 1990

“Filmed primarily at the downtown corner of South Main and Calhoun, Jarmusch does not use the Peabody Hotel, the Mississippi River, Graceland, or most of the other locations that the Chamber of Commerce would thrust before any visiting filmmaker. His domain concerns exactly that territory which is not regularly tread by the masses, and his treatment of Memphis is likely to open a few eyes.”
— Robert Gordon, March 8, 1990

1990: #1 Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese (#2 Reversal of Fortune, Barbet Schroeder)

“This may not be De Niro’s best-ever performance, but he’s got that gangster thang down pat. His accent is flawless, his stature is perfect, and, boy, does he give Sansabelt slacks new meaning.”
— The Cinema Sisters, September 27, 1990

1991: #1 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron (#2 The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme)

“Terminator 2 is an Alfa Romeo of a movie: pricey, sleek, fast, and loaded with horsepower. By comparison, the first Terminator was a Volkswagen. On the whole, I’d rather have a Volkswagen — they’re cheap and reliable. But, hey, Alfas can be fun too.” — Ed Weathers, July 11, 1993

1992: #1 Glengarry Glen Ross, James Foley (#2 The Last of the Mohicans, Michael Mann)

“Mamet’s brilliantly stylized look at the American Dream’s brutality as practiced by low-rent real estate salesmen who would put the screws to their mothers to keep their own tawdry jobs doesn’t relax its hard muscle for a moment. In the hands of this extraordinary cast, it is like a male chorus on amphetamines singing a desparate, feverish ode to capitalism and testosterone run amuck.”
— Hadley Hury, October 15, 1992

1993: #1 Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater (#2 Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg)

“Dazed and Confused is a brief trip down memory lane. The characters are not just protagonists and antagonists. They are clear representations of the folks we once knew, and their feelings are those we had years and years ago. Linklater doesn’t, however, urge us to get mushy. He is just asking us to remember.”
— Susan Ellis, November 4, 1993

1994: #1 Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino (#2 Ed Wood, Tim Burton)

“Even though Tarantino is known for his bratty insistence on being shocking by way of gratuitous violence and ethnic slurs, it’s the little things that mean so much in a Tarantino film — camera play, dialogue, performances, and music.”
— Susan Ellis, October 20, 1994

1995: #1 Heat, Michael Mann
(#2 Toy Story, John Lasseter)

“I’m sick of lowlifes and I’m sick of being told to find them fascinating by writers and directors who get a perverse testosterone rush in exalting these lives to a larger-than-life heroism with slow-motion, lovingly lingered-over mayhem and death, expertly photographed and disturbingly dehumanizing.”
— Hadley Hury, December 21, 1995

1996: #1 Lone Star, John Sayles
(#2 Fargo, Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Although Lone Star takes place in a dusty Texas border town, it comes into view like a welcome oasis on the landscape of dog-day action films … Chris Cooper and Sayles’ sensitive framing of the performance produce an arresting character who inhabits a world somewhere between Dostoevsky and Larry McMurtry.”
— Hadley Hury, August 8, 1996

1997: #1 L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson (#2 The Apostle, Robert Duvall)

L.A. Confidential

“L.A. Confidential takes us with it on a descent, and not one frame of this remarkable film tips its hand as to whether we’ll go to hell or, if we do, whether we’ll come back. We end up on the edge of our seat, yearning for two protagonists, both anti-heroes … to gun their way to a compromised moral victory, to make us believe again in at least the possibility of trust.”

— Hadley Hury, October 2, 1997

1998: #1 Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg (#2 The Big Lebowski, Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Spielberg is finishing the job he began with Schindler’s List. He’s already shown us why World War II was fought; now he shows us how. … Spielberg’s message is that war is horrifying yet sometimes necessary. And that may be true. But I still prefer the message gleaned from Peter Weir’s 1981 masterpiece, Gallipoli: War is stupid.” — Debbie Gilbert, July 30, 1998

1999: #1 Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson (#2 The End of the Affair, Neil Jordan)

“Magnolia is a film in motion; there’s a cyclical nature where paths are set that will be taken. It’s about fate, not will, where the bad will hurt and good will be redeemed.”
— Susan Ellis, January 13, 2000

2000: #1 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee (#2 You Can Count On Me, Kenneth Lonergan)

“Thrilling as art and entertainment, as simple movie pleasure, and as Oscar-baiting ‘prestige’ cinema. Early hype has the film being compared to Star Wars. … An even more apt comparison might be Singin’ in the Rain, a genre celebration that Crouching Tiger at least approaches in its lightness, joy, and the sheer kinetic wonder of its fight/dance set pieces.”
— Chris Herrington, February 1, 2001

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

2001: #1 A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg (#2 Amélie,
Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

“What happens when Eyes Wide Shut meets E.T.? What does the audience do? And who is the audience?”
— Chris Herrington, June 28, 2001

2002: #1 City of God, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund
(#2 Adaptation., Spike Jonze)

“The mise-en-scène of the film is neorealist, but the cinematography, editing, and effects are hyper-stylized, as if The Bicycle Thief had been reimagined through the post-CGI lens of Fight Club or The Matrix.”

— Chris Herrington, April 3, 2003

Lost in Translation

2003: #1 Lost in Translation, Sofia
Coppola (#2 Mystic River, Clint Eastwood)

“Lost in Translation is a film short on plot but rich with incident; nothing much happens, yet every frame is crammed with life and nuance and emotion. … What Coppola seems to be going for here is an ode to human connection that is bigger than (or perhaps just apart from) sex and romance.”
— Chris Herrington, October 2, 2003

2004: #1 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry
(#2 Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino)

“This is the best film I’ve seen this year and one of the best in recent memory. Funny, witty, charming, and wise, it runs the gamut from comedy to tragedy without falling into either farce or melodrama. Its insights into human loss and redemption are complicated and difficult, well thought out but with the illusion and feel of absolute spontaneity and authentic in its construction — and then deconstruction — of human feelings and memory.”
— Bo List, March 25, 2004

2005: #1 Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee (#2 Hustle & Flow, Craig Brewer)

“The film is a triumph because it creates characters of humanity and anguish, in a setup that could easily become a target for homophobic ridicule. Jack and Ennis are a brave challenge to the stereotyped image of homosexuals in mainstream films, their relations to their families and to each other are truthful and beautifully captured.” — Ben Popper, January 12, 2006

2006: #1 Children of Men,
Alfonso Cuarón (#2 The Proposition, John Hillcoat)

“As aggressively bleak as Children of Men is, it’s ultimately a movie about hope. It’s a nativity story of sort, complete with a manger. And from city to forest to war zone to a lone boat in the sea, it’s a journey you won’t want to miss.”
— Chris Herrington, January 11, 2007

2007 #1 Zodiac, David Fincher
(#2 There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson)

“[Zodiac is] termite art, too busy burrowing into its story and characters to bother with what you think.”
— Chris Herrington, March 8, 2007

2008: #1 Frozen River, Courtney Hunt (#2 The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan)

“Frozen River is full of observations of those who are living less than paycheck to paycheck: digging through the couch for lunch money for the kids; buying exactly as much gas as you have change in your pocket; popcorn and Tang for dinner. The American Dream is sought after by the dispossessed, the repossessed, and the pissed off.”
— Greg Akers, August 28, 2008

2009: #1 Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze (#2 Julie & Julia, Nora Ephron)

“I know how ridiculous it is to say something like, ‘Where the Wild Things Are is one of the best kids’ movies in the 70 years since The Wizard of Oz.’ So I won’t. But I’m thinking it.”
— Greg Akers, October 15, 2009

2010: #1 Inception, Christopher Nolan (#2 The Social Network,
David Fincher)

“Nolan has created a complex, challenging cinematic world but one that is thought through and whose rules are well-communicated. But the ingenuity of the film’s concept never supersedes an emotional underpinning that pays off mightily.”
— Chris Herrington, July 15, 2010

2011: #1 The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick (#2 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Tomas Alfredson)

“The Tree of Life encompasses a level of artistic ambition increasingly rare in modern American movies — Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood might be the closest recent comparison, and I’m not sure it’s all that close. This is a massive achievement. An imperfect film, perhaps, but an utterly essential one.”
— Chris Herrington, June 23, 2011

2012: #1 Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow (#2 Lincoln, Steven Spielberg)

“Zero Dark Thirty is essentially an investigative procedural about an obsessive search for knowledge, not unlike such touchstones as Zodiac or All the President’s Men. And it has an impressive, immersive experiential heft, making much better use of its nearly three-hour running time than any competing award-season behemoth.”
— Chris Herrington, January 10, 2013 

2013: #1 12 Years a Slave, Steve
McQueen (#2 Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón)

“Slavery bent human beings into grotesque shapes, on both sides of the whip. But 12 Years a Slave is more concerned with the end of it. McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley are black. It’s one of those things that shouldn’t be notable but is. If you consider 12 Years a Slave with The Butler and Fruitvale Station, you can see a by-God trend of black filmmakers making mainstream movies about the black experience, something else that shouldn’t be worth mentioning but is.”
— Greg Akers, October 31, 2013

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Film Features Film/TV

The Dark Knight Delivers

When director Christopher Nolan rebooted the long-dormant Batman film franchise with 2005’s Batman Begins, he sidestepped the pop-art goofiness of the cult-fave ’60s TV series and the dark-comedy fantasia of Tim Burton’s 1989 version for an unusually realistic approach to the comic-book material. The reaction was mixed: Some fans thought Batman Begins drained the fun and richness from the material. Others thrilled at the more serious approach.

Nolan’s follow-up, The Dark Knight, will not appease those already put off by the grim realism of his Batman vision. But those who thought Batman Begins was some kind of apex of comic-to-screen adaptation should prepare for a reassessment. Though only about 10 minutes longer than Batman Begins, The Dark Knight is far grander in scope and yet moves quicker and feels less bloated.

The earlier film was an impressive muddle, bracketed by an overlong origin prologue and a confusing, unsatisfying triangulation of villains at the end. By contrast, The Dark Knight has a much more elegant, satisfying, linear construction, with memorable action sequences (especially a street scene involving a flipped 18-wheeler) that aren’t set-piece breaks from the narrative but instead are woven into a story that deftly intertwines three primary characters: Batman/Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), anarchic villain the Joker (the late Heath Ledger), and crusading district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart).

The opening shot glides along the building tops of a sleeker, brighter Gotham City, swooping down to catch a bank robbery just as a horde of masked perpetrators begin executing their plan. Here, Ledger’s Joker gets the grand entrance he deserves, his violent assault on what happens to be a mob-connected bank complicating a Gotham police crackdown on organized crime aimed at money-laundering operations.

As the film opens, good cop Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) is now head of the city’s major-crimes unit, where he is secretly in cahoots with the mysterious Batman, officially considered a vigilante and wanted for arrest. Crime is on the decline, but the presence of Batman has set off some unintended consequences — criminal copycats and an underworld moved to ever more desperate attempts to hold its ground against encroaching order. City government is still beset by corruption, with danger increasing for those on the good side of the thin blue line. Grandstanding new district attorney Dent suspects Gordon and Batman’s collaboration, but can he be trusted?

As that set-up might indicate, The Dark Knight is not a typical super-hero/comic-book adaptation. The Batman character is less central to the story this time out, making way not only for two, more-compelling points of a triangle in Joker and Dent but for an entire city apparatus of cops, courts, politicians, and criminals. These characters aren’t modern gods fighting it out across a landscape of civilian onlookers. They are exaggerated figures woven into the landscape and institutions of urban civic life.

In this way, The Dark Knight feels much closer to Michael Mann’s 1995 Los Angeles crime epic Heat (or even earlier Fritz Lang crime dramas like M and The Big Heat) than it does with other comic-book/super-hero movies, possibly including its Nolan-directed predecessor. There’s a procedural tension and insistent, palpable anxiety to The Dark Knight common to great crime films that’s unprecedented in comic-hero adaptations, which tend to follow the form of origin stories followed by oscillating bits of comic relief, psychological torment, and fight scenes. It’s grand, gripping, propulsive filmmaking — with a laudatory lack of obvious computer-generated effects — though not as distinctive shot-by-shot as it might be.

The Dark Knight is also a crime film whose central villain isn’t quite a criminal, at least not in the traditional sense. Ledger’s Joker seems to have sprung, fully formed, from the collective corruption and criminal desperation of the city. There’s no origin story (none that can be trusted, anyway), no name, no history, no explanation. His initial bank robbery isn’t motivated by money but as a way to gain entrance to the ongoing conflict among Gotham’s criminals, their law enforcement counterparts, and Batman. He’s an angel of chaos whose only goal is to be the creation of disorder and mayhem — with echoes of Osama bin Laden, Ted Kaczynski, and Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden from Fight Club.

When Bale’s Bruce Wayne describes this new figure as a criminal like any other, Wayne’s confidant/assistant, Alfred (Michael Caine), responds, “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

In his last completed film performance, Ledger sidesteps the flamboyant humor of most of the character’s iterations (be it Cesar Romero on TV or Jack Nicholson for Burton), substituting a grim, bitter sarcasm. In a movie where Bale’s Batman is the title role and the emotional and narrative arc follows Eckhart’s Dent, it is Ledger who owns the screen whenever he appears. It would have been an iconic performance even if the young actor hadn’t died tragically earlier this year, leaving behind a string of indelible recent performances — from his mumble-mouthed cowboy in Brokeback Mountain to his avuncular surf bum in Lords of Dogtown to his late-Sixties Dylan in I’m Not There.

Here, Ledger seems to internalize the nameless madman, refusing to attempt to charm the audience or ingratiate himself in the manner of such overrated screen-villain performances as Nicholson’s Joker or Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter. Ledger won’t just scare audiences, he’ll rattle them.

More than a typical crime-film heavy, Ledger’s Joker is portrayed as a terrorist, albeit one without clear political motivation. He’s responsible for vicious individual murders, bombings, political assassinations, outlandish mass-murder threats, and shaky, menacing hostage videos. This new kind of threat is combated with rule-bending violence, illegal surveillance, rough interrogation, and at least the suggestion of torture. “When there was an enemy at the gates, the Romans would suspend democracy and appoint one man to protect them,” Wayne says to assistant district attorney and true love Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, replacing and improving on Katie Holmes), by way of defending rough tactics in response to the Joker.

“Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets,” the Joker says late in the film, as fear feeds into chaos throughout Gotham.

But, with all that provocative material in play, The Dark Knight manages to be resonant without straining too much for topicality. It isn’t preachy, and it leaves identifiable real-world politics and issues of patriotism out of the mix. Instead it grapples with elastic but relevant questions about ends and means.

“You’ve got rules. The Joker has no rules,” one character says to Batman. But does he? Ultimately, The Dark Knight is about the difficulty of combating disorder without giving in to it, questioning the ability of a person to self-impose limits on potentially unchecked power, even when well-intentioned, and also whether bending the rules isn’t sometimes necessary. As such, it could be taken as an almost sympathetic critique of post-9/11 government overreach.

In The Dark Knight, victories are short-lived and would-be good deeds are often counterproductive. “You die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain” is The Dark Knight‘s mantra, one repeated by multiple characters, and it’s one that foreshadows the film’s print-the-legend denouement.

The Dark Knight

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