Resnais's Science Fiction

Providence, Alain Resnais, 1977

It's right to talk about the science-fiction element in Resnais. But it's also wrong, because he is the only film-maker to convey the feeling that he has already reached a world which in other people's eyes is still futuristic. In other words he is the only one to know that we are already in the age where science-fiction has become reality. In short, Alain Resnais is the only one of us who truly lives in 1959. With him the word 'science·fiction' loses all its pejorative and childish associations because Resnais is able to see the modern world as it is. Like the science-fiction writers he is able to show us all that is frightening in it, but also all that is human. Unlike the Fritz Lang of Metropolis or the Jules Verne of Cinq cents millions de Ia Begum, unlike the classic notion of science-fiction as expressed by a Bradbury or a Lovecraft or even a Van Vogt - all reactionaries in the end - it is very obvious that Resnais possesses the great originality of not reacting inside science-fiction. Not only does he opt for this modern and futuristic world, not only does he accept it, but he analyses it deeply, with lucidity and with love. Since this is the world in which we live and love, then for Resnais it is this world that is good, just and true.

[...]

Resnais is an agnostic. If there is a God he believes in, it's worse than St Thomas Aquinas's. His attitude is this: perhaps God exists, perhaps there is an explanation for everything, but there's nothing that allows us to be sure of it.

—Jacques Rivette, in conversation with the editors of Cahiers du Cinema, issue 97, July 1959. From Jim Heller's Cahiers Du Cinéma, the 1950s: Neo-realism, Hollywood, New Wave.

Alain Resnais was 91. 

Notes on Looper: On Dangerous Time

SPOILERS ABOUND!

Because I am about a month late to the party, and because this blog needs some original content instead of just links to other work, here are some notes I wrote up about Rian Johnson’s Looper, a film I liked quite a lot:

-There’s an early moment in the car in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks at his sleek red car. He takes his thumb and rubs out a smudge. It’s a classic moment seen in a number of movies, but I couldn’t help but see this as Johnson’s approach to making movies. His films are slick and no detail is left to chance. They are tightly wound in both their narrative structures. His films aren’t puzzles in that they suggest “whodunits,” but that they are built from details into nifty little, closed-world circuits. 

Prometheus: Origins of the Creature from the Space Lagoon

Prometheus

Directed By: Ridley Scott

Written By: Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof

Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Guy Pearce, Logan Marshall-Green, and Patrick Wilson

Director of Photography: Dariusz Wolski, Editor: Peitro Scalia, Production Designer: Arthur Max, Original Music: Marc Streitenfeld

WARNING: Like my review for Cabin in the Woods, I plan on discussing Prometheus in full, without any consideration for what are considered “spoilers” If you are curious to see the film, just go see it. My opinion of whether I liked it or not shouldn’t be the factor. If you are curious to read on why I think the film functions as it does, without any consideration for hiding the aspects of the narrative, then read on. Also, I’m also going to spoil Lost.

            In 2010, the hit ABC series Lost came to an end with what many considered a crashing thud. For six seasons, audiences watched a show about constantly accumulating mysteries on an island. Lost fed its hungry fans with more and more—polar bears in jungles, buttons that saved the universe, alternate timelines—and then abandoned it all for a spiritual sit down with its characters, discarding the main reason that it originally drew viewers. For months before the finale, showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse warned their fans: “true fans” only care about their characters; the mysteries were irrelevant.

            Why this long primer on Lost, when the film of the week, and for many their most anticipated film of the summer, is a prequel to Alien? Because as much as critics will be discussing the craft of director Ridley Scott, Prometheus is assuredly a Damon Lindelof work. His hands are all over this film about a group of scientists traveling to a mysterious planet to find the origins of life. And in many ways, the faults of Prometheus lie in his blame (though Scott shouldn’t escape all the blame). 

Screening Log: Good Scientist Edition

            Heavy screening log this week, folks. Some very interesting and great movies out there for New Yorkers to check out. Film Forum has Celine & Julie Go Boating (seeing this afternoon), IFC Center has The Connection (seeing Wednesday), and Film Society continues its retrospective of Turkish cinema. In news that is wholly awesome, Roger Ebert liked and linked my latest video essay to his Facebook and Twitter followers. Validation! I will also say on my continuing rants about digital projection, that I was not a big fan of the new 4K scan of Bonjour Tristesse at Film Forum. This is another Sony DCP, and like Dr. Strangelove, they tried to recreate film grain. It’s less distracting than it is in Kubrick’s film, but it’s another missed opportunity.

-Shakes the Clown, 1992. Directed by Bobcat Goldthwait. 35mm projection at 92^nd Y Tribeca.

-Bonjour Tristesse, 1958. Directed by Otto Preminger. Digital 2K projection at Film Forum.

-Four Nights a Dreamer, 1971. Directed by Robert Bresson. 35mm projection at Brooklyn Academy of Music.

-Elegy, 1971. Directed by Yılmaz Güney. 35mm projection at Film Society of Lincoln Center.

-Yol, 1982. Directed by Serif Gören and Yılmaz Güney. 35mm projection at Film Society of Lincoln Center.

-Gojira, 1954. Directed by Ishirô Honda. 35mm projection at Japan Society. 

John Carter: Same Hero's Journey, Different Planet

John Carter

Directed By: Andrew Stanton

Written By: Andrew Stanton, Mark Andrews, and Michael Chabon

Starring: Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Dominic West, Mark Strong, Bryan Cranston, and the voices of Willem Dafoe, Samantha Morton, and Thomas Hayden Chuch

Director of Photography: Dan Mindel, Editor: Eric Zumbrunnen, Production Designer: Nathan Crowley, Original Music: Michael Giacchino

Rated: PG-13 for your standard sci-fi spectacle action.

            Have you heard? John Carter is the latest disaster from Disney! It’s an overbloated sci-fi spectacular full of ridiculous characters who have unpronounceable names! It’s overstuffed with CGI that’s there for the sake of more! It cost over $250 million, and if it fails, we’ll never see the likes of it again! Yay, us!

            If you read anything on John Carter this week, which is a very big and costly science fiction epic from Disney, it probably read something like this. And because what the film looks like on its surface, it is certainly easy to pile on the film for representing everything wrong with mainstream filmmaking. Certainly Disney has a trend of these “franchise booter” films since Pirates of the Caribbean, none of which have spawned sequels (see: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Prince of Persia, and Tron: Legacy), and John Carter is certainly written with bookends in order to demand sequel territory. But to dismiss John Carter so easily is to dismiss the grounds the film’s director, Pixar alum Andrew Stanton, wants his audience to approach the film. You have to take the drama as intensely as its characters do, and once you give into the power of John Carter, it’s a wild ride on the red desert.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes: Angry Monkeys

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Directed By:  Rupert Wyatt

Written By: Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, as suggested by the novel “Planet of the Apes”  by Pierre Boulle.

Starring: James Franco, Frieda Pinto, Andy Serkis, John Ligthow, Brian Cox, and Tom Felton.

Director of Photography: Andrew Lesnie, Editors: Conrad Buff IV and Mark Goldblatt, Production Designer: Claude Pare, Original Music: Patrick Doyle

Rated: PG-13 for some violent monkey business.

            Frank Schaffer’s 1968 Planet of the Apes is at its core, a pretty silly movie. The Charlton Heston sci-fi adventure pulled together the right wing concerns of the civil rights movement into an obvious allegory, creating a campy classic, but not certainly memorable save for a few select scenes. How else would you explain that the film’s most iconic sequence—a twist ending so well known that it appears on the DVD box—is the only part basically unrelated to the rest of the story? But it spawned numerous sequels, which vastly vary in quality, as well as a hokey Tim Burton remake only a decade ago. So why return to this planet?

            Well for starters, we no longer have to stare at those amusingly awful make-up designs, which are replaced here by the CGI work of WETA Digital, famed for both The Lord of the Rings and Avatar. And secondly, director Rupert Wyatt, a newcomer off everyone’s radar, knows that this prequel story is inherently campy, but requires a touch of serious depth to be enjoyable. And Mr. Wyatt, as well as the work of WETA, is the reason that Rise of the Planet of the Apes is easily the best blockbuster of the summer.

Attack the Block: Slumdog Alien Killers

Attack the Block

Written and Directed By: Joe Cornish

Starring: John Boyega, Jodie Whittaker, Alex Esmail, Nick Frost, and Luke Treadaway.

Director of Photography: Thomas Townend, Editor: Jonathan Amos, Production Designer: Marcus Rowland, Original Music: Steven Price

Rated: R for the stuff wanna be gangsters do, as well as heavy sci-fi violence.

            In the usual alien invasion movie, we are privileged to see the response of the few and the proud that have the capabilities of taking on the evil invaders: the secret lairs of the Men in Black, the faithless preacher rescuing his family in Signs, or the president in a fighter jet in Independence Day. But what about those who don’t even register on our radar during such an attack? The nobodies living on the fringe of society, who are often the extras being thrown around by explosions?

            That’s the premise for Attack the Block, a British dark satire set around an alien invasion in South London. Our heroes are not the people we usually identify with; they're petty thieves who aspire to be gangsters, and use slang that is more or less incomprehensible. While it’s not the most unique premise in the world, director Joe Cornish treats it with gusto and satire, with more laughs than scares and more thrills than themes. Mr. Cornish weaves his camera through the dark alleys, making for a night of havoc across the streets of London.

Cowboys & Aliens: A Close Encounter Showdown at Sunrise

Cowboys & Aliens

Directed By: Jon Faverau

Written By: Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus, and Hawk Ostby, from a story by Fergus, Ostby, and Steve Oederkerk. Based on the comic book by Scott Rosenberg.

Starring: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olivia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Adam Beach, Paul Dano, and Keith Carradine.

Director of Photography: Matthew Libatique, Editors: Dan Lebental and Jim May, Production Designer: Scott Chambliss, Original Music: Harry Gregson-Williams

Rated: PG-13 for cowboy action and alien action, often in the same shot!

            While the West was won over a century ago, and the Western was lost at the end of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, the last decade or so has been sprinkled with films revisiting the lost genre of American can-do-ism and outlaw values. It’s probably the most American of American film types (though recent examples from countries like Australia and even South Korea have challenged that dominance), and yet it is one that is now a place of brooding melancholy in The Assassination of Jesse James, uncontrollable violence in No Country for Old Men, or soulless capitalism in There Will Be Blood. What can we possibly do to revive the great part of the West—the part of lore and myth?

            If you’re a big Hollywood studio with producers like Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard behind you, the only answer could possibly be aliens (perhaps Transformers, though that’ll be another day). And thus here comes Cowboys & Aliens, which is exactly what you would expect, a Western mashed together with a science fiction action flick that unapologetically borrows tropes from the two genres when needed to make for an entertaining flick. This material is hardly groundbreaking, but it’s more or less inoffensive under the care of Iron Man director Jon Faverau. If anything, Cowboys & Aliens is a case of perfected haggling—you get exactly what you paid for.

Another Earth: Up in the Sky, A Mirror of Our Own Lives

Another Earth

Directed By: Mike Cahill

Written By: Mike Cahill and Brit Marling

Starring: Brit Marling and William Mapother

Director of Photography: Mike Cahill, Editor: Mike Cahill, Production Designer: Darsi Monaco, Original Music: Fall on Your Sword

Rated: PG-13 for some heavy dramatic stuff, including a moment of violence.

            Since man starred up at the stars, and Pink Floyd wrote in a lyric, we’ve been asking the question, “Is there anybody out there?” It’s a simple question about whether we are alone, but there is often an asterisk that people forget to add when they ask it. It’s not just “Are we alone,” it’s also “Is there someone out there who understands my own loneliness?”

            Another Earth is a small drama with a science fiction twist that tries to incorporate that question, along with many others. This Sundance smash combines an intimate drama, not unlike many that emerge from Salt Lake City, and a science fiction allegory that is less imaginable or plausible than it is pumping for philosophical inquiry. The film asks a simple question: What would you do if you knew there was another you out there? Directed by Mike Cahill, who co-wrote the script with the film’s star Brit Marling, Another Earth gently pokes at these questions with some profound implications, while delivering a more-or-less standard drama about coming to terms with oneself.

Source Code Spoiler Q&A: Man Off the Moon

With only two films, director Duncan Jones has become a favorite in sci-fi geekdom. His first film, Moon, followed Sam Rockwell on a base on the Moon as he discovers a copy of himself. Now adapting another writer’s work, Souce Code follows the story of a soldier who must repeatedly assume the identity of a man on a train during the last eight minutes of his life while searching for the train’s bomber. Duncan Jones sat down last week for a discussion of the production and the logic behind the film. READER BEWARE: THIS INTERVIEW CONTAINS MASSIVE SPOILERS AND IS MEANT FOR READING AFTER SEEING THE FILM.

How did this project come about? After Moon it had been announced you were working on a film called Mute.

I actually tried to make Mute before Moon, and it was definitely too ambitious for a first feature film. It was definitely the right call to do Moon first. But I did have these aspirations to make Mute next, and that was one of the reasons I was able to meet up with Jake Gyllenhaal. He had seen Moon and seemed to very much like it. And I’m a huge admirer of his and really wanted to work with him. We met up to discuss what I hoped was going to be Mute. But he said, “I have this great script for you. You got to read it.” And he gave me Source Code. I went home and I read it, and I thought, I think there’s something I can do in this. I loved the pace of it. I was really interested in the science fiction conceit at the heart of it. And it seemed to do so many things. There was a romance to it; there was the opportunity to put some humor to it. In my mind, it was so different from Moon, but after the fact, I realized it’s not that different, especially with the act of being in a heavily confined space.

Could you talk about your interest in science fiction as a genre and maybe what some of your influences were?

I definitely consider myself a science fiction fan. My dad [ed. Note: Mr. Jones’ father is the rock star David Bowie] always liked me to read every evening for an hour or two a night growing up. If I was finding it difficult and hard at the time, science fiction became my favorite, and I was always reading one to another. So whether it was George Orwell’s Animal Farm, or John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffirds, or the major works of Phillip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard—those were the things I really enjoyed. That’s what started my science fiction interest. I love to take the opportunity to look at “What if” stories. Even like J. G. Ballard and look at the world very much how it is, but just tweak one thing. What is the world like this? And it just gives you a whole new perspective.

The Adjustment Bureau: Love May Conquer All, But They Can Change That

The Adjustment Bureau

Written and Directed By:  George Nolfi

Starring: Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, Anthony Mackie, John Slatterly, Michael Kelly, and Terrence Stamp.

Director of Photography: John Toll; Editor: Jay Rabinowitz; Original Music: Thomas Newman; Production Design: Kevin Thompson

Rated: PG-13 for some language, a flash of sex, and some brief moments of violence.

            Scanning any library for their philosophy section will be dozens, if not hundreds of books, on whether this species has free will, or if our lives are determined for us. Some explain that a higher power controls all, while some argue physics controls are lives, while others fight for human control. However, in The Adjustment Bureau, which is adapted a short story by Philip K. Dick, director George Nolfi asks a different question: do we deserve free will?

            A simple but endlessly complex question, and one that challenges in this slick and often reserved science fiction thriller, beefed up by the presence of its star Matt Damon. Mr. Nolfi, making his directorial debut after co-writing The Bourne Ultimatum and Ocean’s 12 for Mr. Damon, understands the ultimate rule of science fiction: less is more. Instead of giving us an incredible layered and complex universe, Mr. Nolfi instead focuses on characters and the romance that connects them. He lets us indulge with Mr. Damon as he flirts with his co-star Emily Blunt, letting us understand these characters before we get into any ridiculous notions of how a team of free will advisors could ever control the world.