Interstellar: Nolan, McConaughey

the 2nd season of Helix feels like: hey, i think we might get cancelled. let's do drugs and write scripts!

oh so it's supernatural

scott I watched half of the first season of helix. (ron moore involvement was enough to interest me)

it was interesting at first but it got stupid pretty fast, i got really annoyed with it really quickly

and i haaated the 100

it's okay, you guys. i knew it was a hard sell going in. the 2nd season of Helix just goes beyond stupid for me in a way that i find transcendent. i just couldn't stop watching. just the thought of like story meetings for the show...

The 100 goes nuts like that too. in a similar way. when they get to the mountain people.

Kyle is captured by infected who dine on the uninfected. He infects himself to avoid being eaten. Sarah reveals to Amy that a transfusion of spinal fluid from an immortal will grant immortality. Amy does not trust Sarah so Landry volunteers to be the first test subject. Julia and Sergio arrive on the island in the present to find Michael's method of sterilizing mortal men. The apples are the result; they are seedless because they are all grafted from a plant called "Mother". When they go to check on Mother, they find that it is missing.

hahaha, you can SEE why i would be so captivated!

fwiw I hated The Martian way more than I was irritated by Interstellar

and Interstellar was way irritatinf

Prometheus both more watchable and lol actually better than both

Yeah, i watched the first half of season one of helix, too. Was irritated by the way you had no believable concept of how this vast base was chugging along day by day while all this mad shit went on

that's nothing. the building the 2nd season is based around is even bigger and on an island with no other power or infrastructure. but there are dozens of constantly pregnant women with no teeth or tongues in the basement so maybe they power everything somehow.

Understand why folks might be bored of Interstellar, but don't get the hate. Found Inception much more insufferable/interminable.

finally saw this since it was playing in 70mm and i figured hey, seems like the kind of movie where you'd rather do that than netflix it. some great sequences in this, and a few memorable visuals, and one very solid performance from mcconaughey but boy is this a mess. so much VERY VERY forced plotting - come hell or high water the characters are GOING to go where nolan says they have to even if it makes them all look like idiots. if it weren't three hours long you probably wouldn't have time to notice it but since there are all these elonnnnnngated scenes where you want to throw stuff at the screen going "I ALREADY FIGURED OUT THAT TWIST, DO YOU TAKE ME FOR AN IDIOT?!" you have a lot of extra time to ponder the imponderable. the three big twists (michael caine, matt damon, and identity of the 'ghost') are all paiinnnnnfully predictable and yet when they get unveiled the movie devotes endless minutes to explaining them in portentous dialog (damon's and mcconaughey's speeches are unforgivable). perhaps they're trying to evoke e the agony of burning precious time on a time-bending gravity planet.

speaking of which: i just cannot for the life of me fathom why anybody in any situation would choose the time-bending gravity planet. or why you'd even send an exploratory mission there in the first place. this is up there with the 'dumb scientist' scene in prometheus and should be equally famous and ridiculed. you know what sounds like a great place for humans to live is right next to a black hole where time is distorted. if that was their bar for planets worth checking out then humanity really is doomed. hey guys we've got three 'maybes' to check out, two of them are NOT time-bending gravity planets and one of them IS. if we go to the normal planets first, we won't have fuel to visit the gravity planet and also return home. troubling. if we go to the gravity planet first, we're risking the possibility that even the slightest delay, for example if the scientist we're there to pick up has a limp, means by the time we get to the other planets the scientists we're there to meet and everybody on earth will already be dead. well this is a no-brainer!

seriously they spend about five minutes talking about this unbelievably high-stakes decision with the fate of all humanity in the balance. what were they supposed to do if they got through the wormhole and ALL the planets had sent positive messages? what's the point of docking up with the space-station super-ship if it still doesn't have enough fuel to visit more than a couple of these dumb planets? it's just all so ridiculously contrived: they have to go to the time-bending planet first or all the aging drama stuff that is supposed to come at this point in the movie doesn't work, and the later decisions the characters make don't have the same stakes. it is also really confusing why they would even try to land on the gravity planet: can't they see from space that it's covered entirely with water? they can see earth and saturn and the wormhole out their spaceship window, but not this? no one brought a telescope? binoculars even? their spaceship doesn't have even the information-gathering capabilities of your average late-20th-century probe?

but setting that aside the prize for stupidity has to go to marooned matt damon, who has decades to think of an evil plan and comes up with "let me try to look as much as possible like a suspicious marooned crazy guy with an evil plan, like we have seen in countless other movies before." why keep the disabled robot around, instead of tossing it off a cliff? why even bother trying to betray and murder everybody instead of trying to get them to actually take you up into space? and isn't it risky to booby trap the robot? suppose the astronauts were like "oh we're so glad you're alive and your planet is great, let's take you and your robot up to the space station with us and we can try to send word back to earth?"

this is also where the the this-must-follow-this-must-follow-this plot carpentry becomes a millstone around the movie's neck: the team has just gotten word that they must get the black hole data or Plan A is futile, and they have come up with a scheme to try and get the data. is it really essential to, right this minute, go on a long hike into a dangerous landscape with matt damon? after what happened on the water planet? is it remotely plausible that the mcconaughey character as portrayed so far in the film would choose to proceed in this fashion with no debate? anyway they don't seem to be carrying any equipment with them - what is the motive for this very sketchy hike again? if the idea is that matt damon wants to give them a peek at the planet's surface below, i for one would be like "cool show me your camera roll!"

the other hilarious thing is the ending, where after three hours of obsessing over the father-daughter relationship, their reunion is brushed over in about thirty seconds of screen time. nolan reveals his real sense of human emotion by instead making sure we carefully track the fates and redemptions of each of the three identical robots.

*raises doc c onto his shoulders, carries him aloft through an adoring crowd as tickertape descends and fireworks spell out the letters 'O T M' across the sky*

also very convenient how it occurs to no one that a long-standing "positive" message from a time-dilated gravity planet is meaningless. like not even at the level of someone going "so wait, if time there passes so differently, how long has Doctor Whatever actually been there?" this is the key to their whole decision to go to the planet - possibly the most important decision in the history of the human race. "well there's not a lot of data but they've been sending positive messages for a long time!" to be fair, these are the same astronauts who didn't bother looking at a map and making sure everybody was briefed on the presence of a black hole until they actually got out there. well, i guess that's plausible - it's not like the main character is characterized by scientific curiosity and an explorer's passion for learning about the unknown, oh wait.

*raises doc c onto his shoulders, carries him aloft through an adoring crowd as tickertape descends and fireworks spell out the letters 'O T M' across the sky*

― licking the yellow Toad next to the teleporter (bizarro gazzara), Monday, August 21, 2017 10:33 AM (fifty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

co-sign

I like Nolan, and there are neat things in this movie, but of all his movies I've seen Interstellar is the one I'm least in a hurry to revisit.

So very OTM it ain't even funny. One of the stupidest flicks of recent years but, hey, Nolan's a genius (bro).

nolan shoots real good and has never been able to tell a story

enjoyed reading over this thread. tears streamed down my eyes as I read all the zings and disses that I'd missed out on in the passing years.

down my eyes? down my face obv

nolan shoots real good and has never been able to tell a story

― Larry Elleison (rogermexico.), 21. august 2017 19:32 (twenty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Which is why he is the best mainstream movie maker.

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/994/418/48b.jpg

I must have posted this before itt but this film has one of my all-time favourite dumb bad movie dialogue exchanges, where a scientist is explaining the concept of wormholes to another scientist

Actual scientist: Now, think about it. What's a circle in three dimensions?

Other actual scientist: 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
...
🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
...
...a sphere!

Saw this recently. Didn't follow the plot at all, it's far too long (especially the Damon scenes) but I enjoyed it very much for the music, some of the visuals, family and love stuff.

Not a big fan of Nolan but I find the hate for him completely ridiculous. Hate the overraters not the overrated, I'm sure that's in the Bible somewhere.

someone handed the Nolans a list of cool science ideas and they just had a family drama where they drop the concepts in one at a time, with the characters kind of mumbling halfhearted justifications to justify each being incorporated in the plot

I must have posted this before itt but this film has one of my all-time favourite dumb bad movie dialogue exchanges, where a scientist is explaining the concept of wormholes to another scientist

Actual scientist: Now, think about it. What's a circle in three dimensions?

Other actual scientist: 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
...
🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
...
...a sphere!

Nolan's tendency to have a character in every scene be a stand-in for the audience reeeeally doesn't work well when everyone in the scene is supposed to be smart

http://blackhistorynow.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/2258401040_4aa50f9ff7-199x300.jpg

okay now this is driving me nuts, there is some big obvious precedent for the 'oh god i am the ghost!' twist and i cannot place it. in the one i'm thinking of it's more of a horror moment, guy realizes he was in all these other scenes and he's shouting and no one can hear him, no no no, don't do it... fuck what is this i'm thinking of? i guess it could just be a twilight zone episode or something but i feel like there's a VERY big movie that has this exact same bit and now i just feel like an idiot for not being able to name it.

a bruce willis movie, mayhap?

Harry Potter 3?

"the sixth sense"?

thinking specifically of some kinda time travel bit, i think. it was me all along oh god nooooooooo

12 Monkeys

Looper

lol wait what if all Bruce Willis movies are actually this movie but better

12 Monkeys is almost certainly what i'm thinking of - thank you.

Was hoping you meant Angel Heart.

Meanwhile I want to know what very promising, nearly-human-ready planets the other twelve sucker astronauts ended up on, or how bad the data had to count as a "no" for these guys when time-bending gravity planets covered in tidal waves get a thumbs up. Are the other planets made out of snakes? Quicksand? Vampires? "Look... Coop. I know. A planet where if you land there your hands and feet turn inside out and air turns to acid inside your lungs isn't anybody's first choice. But this could be our last shot at Plan A, and that's a little more important than any of us getting home to our loved ones, such as Murph."

least of the movie's problems

also i love how Hunger Games guy is in the movie exactly long enough to be the asshole who puts his foot down about going to the gravity planet, and then as soon as they get there he dies. he serves no other function in the film; there's a lot of drama wrung out of him docking two spaceships together, but later it turns out this isn't so hard, because mcconaughey does it under much more extreme conditions and seems confident that should he fail, it's something the robots can do just fine. maybe they should have had the robots do other stuff too, like go check out the fucking death planets. the only person who makes any argument for why they're gathering the most basic first information through staffed missions, rather than sending the rectangle robots or even space probes on fly-bys, is the crazy marooned guy. seems pretty clear nobody at NASA knows wtf they're doing but i guess that at least is consistent with the rightist worldview nolan has laid on the table elsewhere.

someone handed the Nolans a list of cool science ideas and they just had a family drama where they drop the concepts in one at a time, with the characters kind of mumbling halfhearted justifications to justify each being incorporated in the plot

yeah, i love that the press around the time this came out leaned so heavily on kip thorne being involved as a consultant in the science of the movie - which is cool, the guy played a key role in the incredible first detection of gravitational waves and anything that gets more scientists in the media is a good thing imo - but what nolan would have benefited from more is someone telling him 'uh chris this is not how humans work, just fyi'

this feels like his stephen king-style 'too big to fail' moment, i think - making billions for warners with the batman movies gave him carte blanche to write whatever he liked and no-one involved in the production had the clout to edit him

You remind me of a podcast I listened to sometimes, where one of the hosts was physicist Brian Cox, and the other host regularly laughed at him for being the scientific advisor on Sunshine, 'a film about rebooting the Sun with a big bomb'.

(For the record, I actually liked Sunshine--for all its flaws, it was VERY good on the simultaneous beauty and lethality of space--a hell of a lot more than Interstellar)

it had a lot of interesting setup and then turned into Event Horizon

but not as ott, to its loss

i'll happily take a comparison to robin ince! xp

sunshine will forever live in my memory as a cinema experience for creating a super-cool persistence-of-vision trick where a the image of a sudden blast of white light with a silhouette in the centre of the frame lingered on my retinas into the next shot

Is there not a Sunshine thread? no search on Zing

with typical ilx flair, we have What's the best way to discourage people from going to see Danny Boyle's Sunshine?

this came up at drinks tonight and i realized i am still pissed off about that stupid gravity planet