Primer by Shane Carruth

Primer by Shane Carruth

Two friends, who perform scientific experiments as a hobby, accidentally discover a means of time travel.

If anybody has read The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, you will know the workings of the Time Traveller’s time machine is never properly technically explained. The Time Traveller loosely explains his theory about time being a 4th dimension, pulls a lever on his time machine and is able to time travel forwards and backwards. That’s as scientific as the story gets. From a storytelling approach, like the exposition of the Frog DNA being the key to cloning dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, it’s important to give enough story information so the audience can suspend their disbelief but not too much or risk the logic collapsing itself.

Primer challenges this idea. Shane Carruth’s storytelling approach, much like his two main characters, is equally experimental. The realistic way he’s chosen to present the science is noteworthy. Is it more realistic than The Time Traveller pulling a lever to travel back in time? No. Because the science again is never explained in full detail. It’s the feeling of realism and science that’s put onto the story that makes it feel realistic. Many scientific discoveries in the past have been accidental and Primer puts the audience inside that drama through its two scientists Aaron and Abe. The technical jargon-heavy dialogue is probably as close to not having any exposition in a film ever. The effect is jarring because we don’t know what they’re talking about exactly. However, it refocuses on Aaron and Abe’s emotional reactions and that’s where Primer grabbed me. I believed that they were scientists and experienced their excitement and awe of their accidental discovery. I was on the edge of my seat, waiting to see what will happen next.

I’m glad I didn’t see Primer in theaters, as the last 20 minutes of the film really test your brain power as an audience member. The story shifts into 4th gear and crescendoes into a finale. I had to rewind the last 20 minutes and rewatch it a few times to understand what was going on. For that Primer loses some points in my book because the film assumes that it’s okay for the audience to be lost in Primer, it accomplishes that for the first two thirds. Whether an audience member follows along the last third of the film will ultimately justifies Carruth’s story experiment. For me, it proves that as non-cinematic as it is filling your story with exposition, it is still a critical component to storytelling.

That said, I applaud Carruth’s experimental exposition-less approach to storytelling. I believe the completed film is 100% what Shane Carruth set out to make and the fact that he achieved his vision for 7000 U.S. dollars is impressive to me.

Bully by Lee Hirsch

Bully by Lee Hirsch

Bully follows the lives of five American students who face bullying on a daily basis.

This documentary deeply upset me. With all the problems we have in the world, it’s enraging that this problem exists to this degree.

I feel sorry for the child who took his own life over being bullied. It’s sad his voice was not heard when he was alive and that he had to take himself away to get everybody’s attention.

I am perversely happy and relieved for the child who decided to take action and scare her bullies by bringing a handgun onto a school bus and eventually had the criminal charges amended.

It broke my heart seeing one of the kids claiming he does not feel anything anymore about being strangled, punched, stabbed with pencils and verbally abused daily. Something failed in humanity here.

I was surprised there were no bus monitors on these school buses. When I was a kid, the schools never left it up to the bus driver as the sole adult on the bus, they assigned a teacher or a teacher’s assistant to be a bus monitor to watch the kids.

What can a teacher realistically do in that situation? It is battling an invisible social force. It is never just the bully that terrorizes you; it’s also the empty space around the victim that’s reinforced by other people doing nothing. The bullying behavior is a contagious hive-minded social act. Once you bear witness to somebody being humiliated, they feel like they can humiliate them too. That’s how it spreads.

It was unjust watching a teacher totally ignoring one of the kids and forcing him to shake hands with the bully who was just going to bully him again later. I agree that teachers can generally do more than the ones presented here. Those teachers clearly did not care about those students and were defending themselves on a political level. As the film shows, catching the bullying act when it happens doesn’t completely solve the problem; the schools just need to have open discussions with the students. There is a bit of that in the end, but it made me wonder if there are any schools in America that are more active on this issue.

The documentary is not complete. They could have interviewed the teachers’ side or other students or even the school bullies themselves. The director’s agenda was to enrage the audience as much as possible. It’s a one-sided argument, but it worked on me. I am enraged. I have a weak stomach for kids in pain. That said, I want to see a follow-up on these kids and the current situation in America. Did this documentary create any action? Maybe a follow-up film might be a good idea.

The MPAA rating dispute truly does not matter at all; Bully should be screened in schools and discussed in a classroom. It’s a relevant topic that exists parallel to the middle school and high school kids right now. What is the point of waiting for them to be age-appropriate to see it later in their first year in college? Hold the mirror up and disturb them now! Why wouldn’t you?

The Great Gatsby by Baz Luhrmann

The Great Gatsby by Baz Luhrmann

An adaptation of the classic novel by F. Scott Fitgerald, a Midwesterner becomes fascinated with his nouveau riche neighbor, who obsesses over his lost love.

I had a fear that watching this movie before having a solid memory of the original novel will taint my mind’s eye of the original story. I read the original novel in high school but don’t have a distinct memory of it. So before watching the movie, I reread the original novel. So on with the review…

The film starts off blasting at full volume and ramps it up to maximum for its entire first act. Fortunately, Luhrmann does takes a step back and tones down for the latter two-thirds and lets his actors do their magic. The film is well-casted. The actors are playing Fitgerald’s character descriptions exactly to a tee.

Leonardo DiCaprio chooses to play Gatsby as a hopeless romantic with a big dream. He’s able to find a lot of depth to the character without going to darkness and projects the necessary charm. A darker approach to playing Gatsby that would be equally legitimate and interesting. For all the times he has tried to cover his baby-faced looks with facial hair, Leonardo DiCaprio plays young here. In my favorite sequence where Gatsby reunites with Daisy, DiCaprio feels and acts like a young trepid boy who hasn’t imagined a life beyond his grand vision. The lack of an alternate choice in Gatsby’s eyes is such a stark contrast to when he’s playing host in his parties. Give him an Oscar, he’s earned it so many times now.

Carey Mulligan plays to my image of Daisy from the novel, the light empty way Daisy carries herself and particularly the way she speaks. Mulligan’s Daisy says things just to say them but does not necessarily believes the meaning in her words. Joel Edgerton plays a convincing jerk as Tom Buchanan, and it’s played in a way where we can see Tom’s side of things as well.

Tobey Maguire has a natural kindness to him that makes his Nick Carraway a believable third wheel and keeper of everybody’s secrets. The narrations start a bit awkwardly, but they get better as they go on. I didn’t like that Luhrmann cut off the opening paragraph from the novel. Luhrmann could have helped the actors a lot more by giving them more space to breathe out the scenes. He’s directed them to speaking very quickly and constantly overlapping each other. That said, the best dramatic parts of the novel are retained. The actors are what ultimately save the film from spiraling out of control.

There’s been a common complaint about the use of modern hip hop music in the film. Let me say that the hip hop music did not bother me. Why? Luhrmann isn’t concerned of the story’s historical context or presenting the class conditions that the original novel was addressing, but rather re-energizing this classic story with a post-modern sensibility. There’s no way to take Luhrmann’s world completely seriously as a real-life depiction of America in the 1920′s. The world presented in the film has a texture akin to a Jay-Z hip hop music video that happens to have a Great Gatsby theme running through it. If you think about it for a minute, life did not move as quickly back then as this film depicts. Nobody conversed or drived their automobiles at light speed. A sports convertible back in the day wouldn’t have roared like the Batmobile.

Luhrmann is not operating in terms of reality, but hyperreality. He’s punctuating the story purely in terms of emotional states. It’s as if the director is pondering, “How does Nick Carraway feel the moment he meets Jay Gatsby? How can I make that feel like a nuclear explosion?” “What now would equally communicate the materialistic excess in 1920′s New York? Gangster rap!” So in that light, I rather enjoyed the soundtrack. Ultimately, the film remains Luhrmann’s interpretation of Fitgerald’s novel, not a definitive film interpretation of its literary source. Being aware of Luhrmann’s stamp is important to truly enjoying this film. Perhaps the novel is such a classic, a definitive film version of The Great Gatsby probably is not possible. Similar to a Kenneth Branagh Shakespeare film adaptation where the literary source is open to a director’s individual interpretation and is passed on from author to author. Fitzgerald’s novel is tight and well-written enough that it can allow multiple filmic interpretations.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. For my purposes, I’m glad that I reread the book first. I may have to check out the Robert Redford version now.

Into Eternity by Michael Madsen

Into Eternity by Michael Madsen

Into Eternity follows the construction of the Onkalo waste repository at the Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant on the island of Olkiluoto, Finland. Nuclear waste takes at least 10,000 years to process itself from being harmful to living organisms. The film explores the question of preparing the site so that it is not disturbed for 100,000 years, even though no structure in human history has stayed standing for such a long period.

The staff of the repository thoroughly cross-sections every logical justification for the repository, trying to ponder on the many possibile hypothetical scenarios thousands of years into the future. I was fascinated by the film’s big questions. Where would human civilization be in 100,000 years? Will the Ice Age complicate things? Will language stay the same? Will people understand the warnings? If so, will they heed the warnings? Is there be a way to profit off the nuclear waste? Can someone try to reuse the plutonium for more power or even weaponize it? What an infinite amount of unanswerable questions, and yet the safety of humanity hangs on the pure faith that man will do good. Like seeing a map of the Milky Way, Into Eternity made me feel infinitesimal and how ultimately limited we are as humans. We like to think we are in control of things. But as the film suggests, we are our own biggest threat to our future survival.

The film communicates it message heavy-handedly. Every interviewee’s credentials are displayed with the interviewee’s handwritten signature super-imposed over it as if to officially prove to future viewers that this film is no joke. It is approached as if it will be a found footage film warning people not to enter the repository 100,000 years from now. The director Michael Madsen intermittently lights a match in total darkness and recites his monologue quietly to scare the audience and hammer in his point. If he were a young hipster, he would have done these monologues topless. It’s quite silly out of its own context. It is by no means subtle, but it does not need to be. It ultimately offers no answers to it questions but instead it ends on a bittersweet note, totally aware of all the good and ugly things human beings are capable of. I found it both deeply disturbing and deeply poetic.

The topic of nuclear waste storage should be a bigger topic. Everybody should see this film. Highly recommended.

Kumaré by Vikram Gandhi

Kumaré by Vikram Ghandi

American filmmaker Vikram Gandhi transforms himself into Sri Kumaré, an enlightened guru from a fictional village in India, by adopting a fake Indian accent and growing out his hair and beard. Kumaré travels to Arizona to spread his made-up philosophy and gain sincere followers.

Kumaré documents a social experiment that was not well-planned and goes awry. Vikram Gandhi starts off by pretending to be a false prophet to make fun of religious people. But when he starts to gain sincere followers, he sees that these people have real-life problems and need hope and guidance, he starts to feel guilty. What was he expecting would happen?

The first half of the film is funny and disturbing in the way that it fulfills the entirety of Gandhi’s thesis. We laugh at these followers because we have a social distance from it. For the latter half of the film, it becomes uncomfortable as his followers start to become close with Sri Kumaré, telling him intimate details of their personal lives and asking him for advice. He fights with himself over how he should tell them. This is where the documentary lost me. I did not care one bit for Vikram. I was cringing for his followers and kept watching to see their reaction when the curtain was pulled before them. So in the end, do the ends justify the means? I personally do not think so. Other people may see it differently. To me, Vikram Gandhi becomes the person he set out to mock. The film celebrates its own mean-spiritedness at the end and it just left a bad taste in my mouth. I am not one to make fun of other people’s faith.

If there is anything positive to come out of Gandhi’s experiment, it’s that everybody has the potential to find peace within themselves, whether that’s religion, yoga, golf, knitting or gardening. People should believe in something that they can find happiness in, even if it’s not God.

But I already knew that before watching this film.

Oblivion by Joseph Kosinski

Oblivion by Joseph Kosinski

A veteran assigned to extract Earth’s remaining resources begins to question what he knows about his mission and himself.

Unlike a lot of science fiction films that often have busy mechanical designs and crowded backgrounds, there is a very distinct simplicity to Oblivion’s production designs. The empty barren Icelandic landscapes, machines and buildings built in straight clean lines and the bright daylight all help create an effective atmosphere. The film is beautifully shot and finds a natural beauty in post-apocalyptic destruction. Often I found myself just gazing upon the landscapes and felt awe watching huge robotic monolithic ships harvesting the Earth’s water. Oblivion should definitely print a production art book.

The best performance in the film is Andrea Riseborough’s. A lot of the intrigue and mystery of what’s really going on behind this world is built from Riseborough’s performance. The intrigue is built so well that the beginning section with her and Tom Cruise makes up for the more interesting portion. She plays a very fine line between someone who is concealing a secret or not wanting to know the truth. As the audience, we cannot tell which one it is.

There are little Americanisms in the film that are problematic. At the beginning, Tom Cruise’s character lands an aircraft on Earth. As he gathers his gear, he puts on a New York Yankees baseball cap. Why? Even if it were a blue-collar habitual daily routine, why wouldn’t he have put it on before flying the aircraft? Wouldn’t there be more sun in the sky than in the ground? It’s not a big deal, and it took me out of the movie a bit.

Oblivion draws upon a lot of science fiction films in the past. Example? Let’s just say Tom Cruise jogs on a treadmill that is not rectangular. For that, science fiction fans may have a harder time enjoying Oblivion as they may fall into an accidental game of ‘spot the reference’. I personally didn’t have a problem with that. It doesn’t bring anything new to the science fiction genre but I enjoyed it nonetheless.