Movies – Page 115 – A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Darkly funny, with teeth

23/01/2015MegeLeave a comment

It’s the darnedest thing with What We Do In The Shadows: coming out of the movie theatre, I thought I had seen an OK comedy, and now, I still think about it with a smile. I guess I like it better than I wanted to admit.

What We Do… tells about the problems and pastimes of four vampires from all over the world and from different historic eras who now live together in an old Wellington house. Viago is from late Renaissance and has come to New Zealand for love; some nights, you can see him staring at a window of a retirement home in which his immortal beloved, now a 96 year-old woman, is watching TV. He doesn’t mind the age gap – he’s four times older than she is.

There’s Vladislav from the early Middle Ages, and really rather violent when he finds out that modern people no longer succumb to his powers of suggestion and hypnosis. When people catch him staring through the window into their living-room, they invite him in. He is mortally afraid of the Beast, who is not who you think it might be. The youngest member is Deacon, a nazi vampire, who actually boasts about his involvement in highly unethical medical experiments. He thinks he is a great erotic dancer, but… erm, no, he isn’t. The oldest inhabitant is Petyr, who is over 8’000 years old. The others are in awe of him and don’t dare complain when he doesn’t do the dishes.

I guess I liked the jokes and funny situations as much as anyone, but I sometimes need some kind of minimal story to go along with. There are a few scenes where the vampires have to get along with a bunch of werewolves who try to work on their bad behavior: “Remember your manners, guys: werewolves, not swearwolves.” On the whole, the movie consists of a 86-minute parade of vampire jokes, most of them funny. I liked the two young girl vampires who have made it their mission to kill every pedophile they can find. What We Do… is a comedy on the surface, but there is dark stuff lurking underneath.

There is a new addition to their group by accident: Nick, who goes around telling people he starred in Twilight, and nobody believes him because, well, he looks nothing like Robert Pattinson. Perhaps the biggest joke of them all is not in the movie, but in the production notes: Some of the scenes were shot at the place where they shot some of the Lord of the Rings stuff – it’s impossible to tell since all the scenes take place during nighttime.

There is a human friend, Stu, who tells the group about modern communication. When Deacon receives his first ever text message, it’s from Vladislav: “There’s a crucifix behind you.” Poor Deacon almost jumps out of his skin. Viago, before biting his virgins, makes them dinner and plays a song on his guitar: “They should at least feel good and have fun before I kill them.” And so on. If you need a really strong story in a movie, look elsewhere. If not, you are in for a really funny comedy.

Force Majeure, medium strength

15/01/2015MegeLeave a comment

The Swedish movie Force Majeure, or Turist, as it is called here in Switzerland, is a mediocre affair, but you can almost see the very good movie it has entrapped in itself. A Swedish family is on a skiing holiday in a French resort when they are sprinkled over by the fallout clouds of a controlled avalanche. While Ebba, the mother, instinctively stays to protect the two kids, Tomas, the father, runs away.

Ebba is devastated that her husband would abandon his family in a dangerous situation, while Tomas claims he did not flee the scene. Their marriage has its first cracks, and the two kids are afraid their parents might be getting a divorce. Ebba and Tomas only very eventually broach the subject because, well, sometimes the ones closest to you cannot tell you the truth because a) they don’t want to hurt you, and b) they will have to live with the consequences their telling might bring.

This is all very well handled, but there are scenes that are only loosely connected to that main story. There is a bit where Ebba is talking to a woman who is married while she and her hubby keep seeing other people. That scene is there because Ebba now knows that her husband is much less reliable than she would have guessed, and she is trying to find out if other people have to deal with such weakness, too. But instead of talking to that woman with her strong sense of self, Ebba could have talked to the woman’s boyfriend who is there with her at the hotel. What is it like to be the boyfriend of a married, strong-willed woman? Do you consider yourself a weak man beside a strong woman, or do you have to be just as strong to keep up? We get much less from Ebba in that scene than we should – we merely learn that she could not live in an open relationship. But we already guessed that.

There are good things in Turist, too. You might remember Kristofer Hivju from Game of Thrones because of his flaming red hair and beard and intense eyes; here, he plays Mats, the soft-spoken friend who has brought his 20-year-old girlfriend to the resort and feels he has to negotiate between Ebba and Tomas because, being divorced, he is an expert on marriage and relationships. The scenes between him and his girlfriend are very funny without breaking the ominous atmosphere of the movie’s main story. Ebba and Tomas always start their fights in the corridor where everybody can hear them, instead of fighting in their apartment in front of the kids. Another good thing are the expository scenes with the avalanche cannons and snowplows. And it is a very bold choice to play Vivaldi’s Summer over scenes of dense snow.

The movie ends twice. Ebba goes missing in dense fog, and Tomas finds her, his masculinity half-way restored. Then the bus on the way home almost crashes on the serpentine mountain road, and they continue their journey on foot. Both scenes would have been good endings. To leave them both in there is to add unnecessary running time. Drop the ending in the fog, and drop the conversation between Ebba and the other woman, and you have a better movie.

Fighting the franchise funk

06/01/201506/01/2015MattLeave a comment

Over the last few years we’ve been watching the Harry Potter movies with a friend who lives abroad; every time she’s been over, we watched another one or two of the films, and over the holidays we saw the two parts of Deathly Hallows, in my case for the third or fourth time. As far as I’m aware, the first part fared less well with critics and audiences than the second one, and it’s clear why: it’s definitely the less crowd-pleasing film of the two. Its plot meanders, what big setpieces there are don’t feel as cathartic as the showdown against Voldemort, and a lot of the movie seems to be dedicated to Harry, Hermione and, with some interruptions, Ron hiking, camping and generally looking wet, cold and miserable.

Nonetheless, rewatching the two films, I found myself clearly preferring the first one. Deathly Hallows Part 2 largely works because it’s the end of a journey, but it feels (and felt even when I first watched it) perfunctory to some extent. We need to resolve the different plot strands, we need to bring closure to Snape’s story, we need to dispose of the remaining horcruxes and of Voldemort himself – but little of this feels like it tells us anything about the characters. We know that Harry is brave, Hermione is smart and Ron is, well, Ron, and we also know that the visual effects wizards are great at doing what they do, as are the designers, artists and everyone else responsible for the way the film looks and sounds. After a while, though, setpieces become interchangeable, and while the escape from a fiery Room of Requirement is exciting in the moment, it’s also strangely bland. It’s a Harry Potter movie, of course there would be some chase or fight involving pixel magic, derring do and last-minute escapes. It’s fan service to some extent, but fan service isn’t automatically bad.

However, there are moments in Deathly Hallows Part 1 that are decidedly different, that are quiet and unexpected, that have nothing to do with crowd-pleasing 3D whooshery. The film already starts with some of these scenes, filled with foreboding and sadness, as Hermione for instance wipes herself from her parents’ memories so they’d be safe. It’s a largely wordless scene, not of teary farewells but of loss and poignant resolve. Another scene I found surprising and delighting was the animated Tale of the Three Brothers; and later, as Ron is temporarily off and Harry and Hermione are alone, Nick Cave’s “O Children” plays on the radio, and Harry engages his friend of many years in a clumsy, sweet dance. It doesn’t further the plot, and it doesn’t get the pulse racing with excitement and danger – but it surprised and enchanted this muggle here more than all of the final part of the final part of Harry Potter.

Obviously the Potteriad wouldn’t have worked, or at least been as successful, if all it consisted of were these quiet, unexpected, intimate moments (though it would be intriguing to see someone try their hand at creating the Before Sunrise of the wizarding world) – but for me it highlights both the shortcomings and the potential of big franchises. Many of the fans love the Harry Potter films for the magic and the world, the quidditch matches and firebreathing dragons and wizards’ duels, so obviously these are things by which later instalments are judged. We want what we know, what is comfortable, because that’s how we came to love the franchise. These expectations are reasonable, but they’re also a trap, keeping a franchise frozen like an insect in amber. It’s similar with something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where we get some variation between the different strands – Iron Man isn’t the same as Captain America, whose pulpy WW2 first instalment and more sombre second film differ from Thor‘s sci-fi/mythology mashup – but we know what we’ll get, namely some good action setpieces, some snarky humour and a band of heroic characters that need to put their rivalries and disagreement aside and come together as a family to defeat some colourful yet dull villain – or, if you’re lucky, Tom Hiddleston.

Franchises are the storytelling equivalent of comfort food: when you want a plate of spaghetti, you don’t want it to surprise you with chopped coriander or shiitake mushrooms or a honey-aceto balsamico reduction with shavings of shock-frosted lamb’s kidney. The line between comfort food and tinned spaghetti is thin, though, and there’s always a risk of that exciting quidditch match or that bit where the Hulk goes smash getting stale, to the extent where you hardly know which particular instalment you’re watching at the time. Franchises thrive on constancy, on giving fans what they want, but they can’t be that and that only if they want to be alive and vibrant. They need scenes like Harry and Hermione’s awkward dance to Nick Cave, just like they need Trevor “I am (not) the Mandarin” Slattery. They need to be willing to withhold the simple, immediate gratification of More Of The Same” at times if they want to be good and not just safe. And there’s potential in exactly this: fans know what to expect, so you can surprise them by playing with the format. The most memorable episodes in TV series (which tend to be prone to becoming formulaic) are often the ones that, once the format has been established, play with the formula: Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s “The Body”or “Once More With Feeling”, House M.D.‘s “Three Stories”, M*A*S*H‘s “The Interview”. It’s because people know the formula that they see how it’s played with, and if it works, it can create some of the most memorable moments a franchise can afford.

Doing that with an entire film is risky: people who go and watch a Harry Potter movie want to see an adventure for the whole family, with magic and special effects setpieces. Iron Man fans want an action comedy with explosions, flying metal suits and Robert Downey Jr. doing what he does so well. But the safety net of the franchise shouldn’t become a prison. By all means, establish a formula, make us fall in love with the flying brooms, the comic-book villainy, the TIE Fighters and Star Destroyers and light sabres. But use those things as a starting point. Don’t just give us what we already know we want: surprise us and win our hearts again by whisking us into a clumsy, earnest dance to the strains of “O Children”. Because being a franchise doesn’t mean we want to watch the same movie over and over again, forever stuck on repeat.

Wishing everyone a happy 2015… at 25 frames a second

31/12/201430/12/2014MattLeave a comment

My partner-in-blog has written about his year in pictures, so I’ll end 2014 with three videos: two about the main thing that keeps us going here at Château Goofybeast, i.e. film, and one bonus one that barely qualifies as a video, but damn, if the music ain’t pretty. Here’s wishing each and every one of you a great 2015, with lots more films, books, comics, games and whatever your eyes, ears and hearts may desire!

Things I’ve seen in 2014

29/12/2014Mege1 Comment

It’s been a year of good series. The palatable horror of two seasons of Hannibal, which is much, much more than a retreading of the Thomas Harris books. The creepiness of Les Revenants, an elaborate French ghost story. The film-noir style and jarring relationship between the two cops in True Detective. The first season of The Fall with its head-to-head between a cop and a serial murderer. The first season of Utopia in which five comic-book fans try to decipher their favourite graphic novel. (The Fall and Utopia clearly turn for the worse in their second seasons.) Happy Valley. I also found good things in Broadchurch, The Leftovers, and Top of the Lake.

Movie-wise, it was a year of diminished returns, but I would like to point out The Salt of the Earth, Nightcrawler, Everyday Rebellion, and Blue Ruin. I’ve written elsewhere about Ida and Locke, but the annual movie cake must go to the excellence of Under the Skin. I’ve praised Jonathan Glazer’s movies elsewhere, but I’ve seen this one first drunk, then sober, and it works both ways. Some scenes are so strong that they have become part of my movie-going DNA.

In some respects, Under the Skin is a horror movie, but there is really only one moment where you might jump out of your seat. At its core, it’s a story about… well, an alien visiting Earth, for whatever reason or to whatever end. She (she?) is very busy trying to get to know the human race in a lonely, isolated Scotland. She lures males into a pool of black quicksand, and since she looks like Scarlett Johansson, there are several willing victims. She’s not evil, but seems to imitate what she thinks is female human behavior. To her surprise, she discovers in herself a kind of empathy, until she no longer has the upper hand.

Since this is the point where one chapter ends, I would like to thank Matt K. for Les Revenants, and Patrick M. for Southland. Another chapter will begin soon: I am looking forward to Inherent Vice and Birdman. Countless surprises await in the rectangular dark. We’ll see.

Death and betrayal

21/12/2014Matt2 Comments

I found it practically impossible to watch A Most Wanted Man without constantly being aware that the man I was watching on the screen was dead and this was his last film. Philip Seymour Hoffman was one of Hollywood’s most unlikely stars and often one of the best things about the films he was in; this swansong, based on a John Le Carré novel, may not be one of the ones Hoffman will be most remembered for, but it is definitely a worthy final addition to his filmography.

As with many of the films based on Le Carré’s works, A Most Wanted Man is not so much a spy thriller as a drama, with a distinct tendency towards tragedy. Hoffman plays a jaded German espionage operative keeping an eye on the Muslim community in Hamburg, and when a former Chechen radical enters his hunting grounds illegally he hopes to use him as an asset in his investigation of a Muslim philanthropist with possible ties to Al Qaeda. While the film doesn’t present us with as much of a quagmire of connections, motives and plots as a successful other recent Le Carré adaptation did – and Hoffman’s operative is a descendant in spirit of George Smiley – it is about similar themes. Years ago the Swiss magazine Du published an issue on John Le Carré titled “All Sorts of Betrayal”, and apparently this is still what the author keeps returning to. All of these betrayals, whether of friends, lovers, or of organisations and countries, are finally private at heart, and A Most Wanted Man sees its main character trying to weigh betrayals, to tempt, bully and cajole others to violate trust to prevent a bigger, more final betrayal.

Except, of course, in Le Carré’s world there is no such thing as a lesser evil, and most definitely not one that can be trusted to end up being lesser. Even more, Hoffman’s body language, the way he looks at people and practices a studied cynicism, all these make it clear that A Most Wanted Man will not end happily for anyone. And this fatalism is in part why this is a good but not a great film: only in rare moments is there the urgency that comes from hoping, and even believing, that this may not end in tears. There is a grain of… faith in something other than jaded pragmatism, perhaps? Belief that even in espionage people, organisations and countries can still hold on to vestiges of a soul? And this belief keeps the main character going, but the tone of the film is as hangdog as Hoffman himself, though without his occasional sparks of hope and of righteous anger. As an audience, though, it’s difficult not to know better: this will end badly, so why commit emotionally? If anything, the film prompts us to be even more jaded than its protagonist, and this works against A Most Wanted Man.

As may the real-life circumstances: Hoffman’s death hanging over the film may make it more poignant, but this poignancy is not in sync with the film. I was prompted to sadness, though not by Le Carré’s story so much as by knowing that this is the last time we’re seeing a lead performance by an actor gone too soon. A Most Wanted Man is a good film, it’s crafted beautifully, its performances are consistently strong, but its greatest tragedy may be that it serves most as a reminder of a different tragedy that has nothing to do with the film itself. Perhaps it will be easier to see it for itself in five to ten years, when it no longer feels quite as much like a obituary.

In space everyone one can hear you feel

08/12/2014MattLeave a comment

Interstellar pushed many of the right buttons for me, primarily the big one labelled “Sense of cosmic wonder”. I was the kid who had a poster of the solar system on his bedroom wall for an embarrassingly long time; I loved anything to do with space, but I reserved a special love for space exploration, especially of the supposedly authentic kind. Sure, I wanted to fly an X-Wing, but that thought never felt as wondrous as that of NASA journeys, of the Apollo missions or the Space Shuttle. Wormholes and black holes? Accretion disks? Count me in.

That sense of wonder was definitely there when I watched Interstellar, and the film captures it well. What it captures less well, though, is human emotion – which is a problem, since for all its space age imagery the film is essentially about sentiment much more than it is about physics. It’s not the emotions themselves that are the problem; thematically, Interstellar uses its premise and setting to tell a very human story. The problem is that the Nolans are much better at telling a different kind of story – one that is conceptual, that tends to be about puzzles. At their best, the Nolan-directed and -penned films are interested in the feelings of their characters, but they don’t focus on them head on. Their protagonists are often emotionally repressed, in denial or simply unable to access or express their feelings, and the stories tend to derive poignancy from this inability. Interstellar, though, wears its heart on its sleeve. Its characters talk about their emotions, they cry quickly and freely – and while the actors are more than capable, they can’t overcome that the words they’ve been given are often clumsy, overly explicit, explaining things too much. The worst scene in this respect has a teary-eyed Anne Hathaway trying to impress on her fellow astronauts that love is a force transcending space and time. Done differently, written better and allowing for some ambiguity, this could work, but in the film it feels like a NASA-themed Hallmark card. Those moments very much suggest that when it comes to the Nolans’ dialogue, quite literally, the less said, the better.

It is this tendency to overexplain, to make things too literal, that hobbles some of Interstellar‘s central scenes as much as its clumsy handling of emotion. Late in the film, the story bends causality back on itself in a classically sci-fi way, but where Christopher Nolan often finds striking images for settings and situations, here they turn faintly ludicrous, and they fire rockets full throttle into silliness the more the protagonists explain what is happening. All fiction, including speculative fiction, engages in some narrative handwaving, leaving gaps with respect to what is happening or how precisely it is happening, because the exact mechanics are irrelevant to what the story is about. Interstellar, however, tangles itself up in knots by trying to fill in the blanks, when it should well have left alone. Trying to elaborate on what is happening, the expository dialogue is hamfistedly literal, drawing attention to what is arguably least important, and raising questions about its feasibility that shouldn’t come up in the first place. (One can only imagine a Nolan-penned 2001: A Space Odyssey, giving the Monolith a -logue to explain to Dave Bowman what the last 20 minutes meant.)

When I first saw the Interstellar trailer, I was intrigued, but I was equally worried that this would be Nolan’s Contact, an intriguing sci-fi tale that takes a turn for the sentimental: daddy issues in space. It isn’t quite that bad, and there’s a lot to like about the film. It is ambitious, it is often beautiful, and Matthew McConaughey has vastly improved as an actor since the giddy days of 1997. Interstellar is a compelling illustration of both the strengths and the limitations of Nolan’s filmmaking, though, and it is frustrating in how it could have been a better, more subtle and more convincing film. This isn’t a complaint along the lines of “Waiter, there’s some sentiment in my sci-fi soup!” I don’t think that hard sci-fi, or any sci-fi, needs to lose the human element. What it does need, though, is a human element that’s done with the same skill as the visual effects. Interstellar excels at showing us the surfaces of alien worlds, but its telescope is flawed when pointed at the human heart.

Lunchtime in Mumbai

23/11/2014MegeLeave a comment

The Lunchbox starts with Ila, a Mumbai housewife and mother, cooking food and packing it in a metallic lunchbox that consists of stackable bowls. That lunchbox gets delivered across Mumbai to a grumpy, lonely office worker. He is mesmerized by the food.

If you want, you can look at The Lunchbox as a modern-day fairy tale. Ila wants to rekindle her failing marriage by enchanting her careless husband with outstanding food. We realize only eventually that Saajan, the grumpy office worker, is a complete stranger to her. The Mumbai lunch distribution industry has made a mistake. “Impossible!”, says the man who delivers Ila’s lunchbox. “The people from Harvard have confirmed that our system is faultless!”

She cooks lunch the next day, adding a little note of apology to the bowl with the naan. He writes back, complaining about the salt. A correspondence starts, in which Ila can tell about her loveless life, and Saajan, to his own surprise, tells Ila about his deceased wife. Although they have never met, they feel less lonely that way. The comfort of strangers is the best thing in both their lives right now.

A lesser movie would make them fall in love with each other. Not this film, although Ila’s food seems to have such power. Eventually, Mumbai and its overcrowded public transport system play a part. Saajan is assigned a successor, but is not keen on training the man. This movie manages to balance light comedy with darker undertones. I liked the unseen upstairs neighbor, an older woman who shouts recipe suggestions down into Ila’s kitchen. I also liked the small moments of coincidence, for instance the story about the ceiling fans.

The two main leads are played by Irrfan Khan and Nimrat Kaur, who left their impressions at this year’s Sundance festival. The director, Ritesh Batra, grew up in Mumbay and knows a lot about food and the lunchbox delivery system. This movie is his debut and is the result of a documentary he didn’t finish in favor of this feature. Towards the end, one or two scenes feel contrived and on autopilot, but no matter: The Lunchbox is a delight. All that food made me hungry. Maybe once in a while, you should go to the kitchen and cook as if your life depends on it.

And when she was bad…

18/11/2014MattLeave a comment

David Fincher’s Gone Girl is yet another example that Fincher is one of the most skilled directors working in Hollywood these days. It is gorgeous to look at, with the various elements of cinematic craft coming together almost to perfection. It is also a film that I found at turns annoying, ludicrous and distasteful, and that’s almost entirely due to the material. Similarly to Fincher’s previous film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it’s impossible not to admire the sheer craft while wishing that he had chosen better material to work with.

Gone Girl, that is, the story and storytelling, is not without merits, but it’s too glib for its own good. There’s a lot here that individually is interesting, clever, engaging, amusing and chilling, but much of the time it doesn’t really add up: one moment it’s amoral and cynical as hell, the next it turns to moralising with a misogynist slant; in one scene it’s an effective if obvious satire of the media and the audience’s complicity that goes for the uncomfortable laugh, the next it’s a psychological thriller veering into outlandish melodrama, with only the most superficial similarity to reality. There’s an OCD quality to the story, as if Gone Girl didn’t quite trust itself to hold our attention if it decided to be one thing only. Not that films can’t strive for different things at the same time, but in this particular case we end up with a bit of a Frankensteinian creature on screen.

Which is a shame, not least because to the extent that the film coheres it’s due to the dark, sharp performance in the emptiness where a different movie’s heart would be. I’d enjoyed watching Rosamund Pike in earlier performances, but I wasn’t prepared for how good she is in this. Again, though, there’s a tension here between the nuanced intelligence Pike brings to the part as a performer and the lurid, trashy quality of the material. For all its polish, Gone Girl is Grand Guignol, made up to look like, well, a David Fincher film, and one of his best-looking to date. Look beyond the aesthetics, though, and the one Fincher film that this most resembles is The Game, another movie of very effective individual parts that cohere less and less the more you look at the whole.

Arguably Fincher’s a stronger, more skilled director at this stage than he was when he made The Game, so Gone Girl holds together better by the sheer quality of the filmmaking, but as I left the cinema, more than anything else I was hoping that next time round he’d decide to film a better script. His particular skillset is well suited to clever writing (as, say, The Social Network shows), but ideally his scripts have to be as clever as they think they are, and I don’t think that’s true for Gone Girl. I hope that whatever he decides to do next he runs like hell from material that in the final analysis is glib more than anything else.

We need to talk about Christopher

10/11/2014MattLeave a comment

I haven’t yet seen Interstellar. I’m definitely curious about the film and looking forward to it – I’m still as much a sucker for gorgeous space imagery as I was back when I was eight years old and had a poster of the solar system and its planets on my bedroom wall. At the same time, I have to admit to some apprehension, and that’s due to two things: Christopher Nolan and his fans. There’s a lot of hyperbole about Nolan and his films, just as there is too much criticism that dismisses his films, or patronises them, due to his making genre cinema. It’s difficult to find discussion of, say, The Dark Knight or Inception that doesn’t treat the films as either cinematic masterpieces or as hollow and derivative, as the sort of genre movies that let some sci-fi and superhero fans go, “Look? That’s brainy, isn’t it? The genre’s all grown up now?” At its worst, Nolan fetishism brings forth silliness such as proclaiming the director the new Kubrick.

I like Nolan’s films, even The Dark Knight Returns for all its flaws. Nolan has proven that he’s a skilled, smart director who knows how to handle his material well. He’s also deeply flawed: several of his films, for all their complicatedness, aren’t actually all that complex. He’s too enamoured of Big Questions that aren’t actually all that big or relevant, and that have been done before. Nolan likes a bit of the good old “… ah, but is it?” at the end of his films, but try to answer those questions and there’s not all that much there. That spinning top in Inception, the question whether at the end of the film Cobb is still in the dream? That twist is already there in the film’s premise – it’s predictable. Similarly, Memento‘s conundrum concerning Sammy Jankis’ identity? It’s a twist too far, an example of Nolan not trusting his film to have made the same point about Leonard’s malleable identity in the absence of memory already, taking it to near-absurdity. If Nolan’s films, and especially his scripts, insisted less on their apparent depth (which often totters on the border to pompousness), they’d actually make a more convincing case for being deeper than your general genre fare. As it is, through his films Nolan doth protest too much that he’s making grown-up films for grown-up people with grown-up brains.

There’s something else that Nolan doesn’t do all that well, and that’s action sequences. Given the right conceit, his action can be amazing: look at the hotel fight in Inception, divorced from gravity. In the same film, though, you get the sub-Bondian mountain action, which is dull and generic. Look at The Dark Knight‘s truck sequence and it’s a confusing mess of direction, cinematography and editing, while the Heat-with-clowns intro works tremendously well. I remember seeing The Dark Knight at the cinema and loving some scenes while wondering in others whether we were being shown a version of the film edited (and badly at that) to be shown on planes.

At the same time, Nolan does excel at doing films about men who make convoluted plans to avoid facing the emotional wrecks they are. Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige and Inception: in all of these, Nolan finds striking images and interactions to show his protagonists’ helplessness and the lengths to which they go to deny just how lost they are. To my mind, these themes are much more interesting than yet another treatise on what is real and what is a dream, or that central question that mankind has faced for centuries: whether Batman can be broken. Nolan has been accused of making cold films that are thin when they try to be emotional, and I don’t think sentiment is something he does well, either as a director or as a writer: but give him characters, especially men, who don’t know how to deal when faced with their own failure and loss, and he’s riveting. This is a director who should do a modern version of the Orpheus myth – if he hasn’t already done so in various ways. His Orpheus, when told he cannot look back, would be likely to construct an ingenious device of smoke, mirrors and cameras to trick Hades, without ever realising that Eurydice is gone for good.

As I said at the beginning, I’m curious about Interstellar, and I’m sure it’ll be a visual triumph. The trailer worries me, though; it looks like Nolan is making his Contact, complete with daddy issues. I’m not sure I trust him as a director to handle sentiment head-on: he’s no Spielberg, and even Spielberg isn’t always up to the task. Nolan has been best so far when he had his characters approach emotion at oblique angles, because they’re rarely good at handling them. At his best, there’s an understated but effective undercurrent of emotion in his films. I’m very much hoping that Interstellar will prove more The Prestige than Contact, and that he didn’t try to be both Kubrick and Spielberg at the same time. It didn’t work for Spielberg either when he did A.I.

P.S.: For anyone else who has a yen for astronomy porn, there’s the upcoming game Elite: Dangerous. In space, no one can hear you become speechless at the sight of all those planetary rings.