STARRY KNIGHTS

Space pilots race to save humanity in thoughtful epic 'Interstellar'

Nobody has ever accused Christopher Nolan of thinking too small. A  master of the brainy action thriller, his films are as crammed with ideas and concepts as vehicle chases, and explosions (are although there are plenty of those too).

From the brilliant intricacies of Memento and The Prestige, to The Dark Knight (the best and broodiest of his Batman trilogy, with its good/evil Doppelganger undercurrent), to the wildly imaginative Inception, Nolan knows how to deliver a feast of a film that keeps viewers chewing over it for days.

His latest, the sci-fi epic, Interstellar, is no exception—although in this case, it takes a lot longer for Nolan's cool, cerebral storytelling to start pulling the viewer in. Those who categorically dislike sci-fi will find much to protest here—like lengthy sequences of gigantic pieces of hardware lumbering through space while orchestral music swells on the soundtrack.

Surf's up on one wet planet in Interstellar.

 Placing star Matthew McConaughey front and center most of the time feels like a naked stab at down-home folksiness to soften the film's cold edges.

And yet, just when the ponderousness of it all threatens to take over the film, the prickly human element that Nolan and his co-screenwriter brother, Jonathan Nolan, have been seeding into the plot from the earliest scenes finally starts to pay off.

The relationship between engineer/astronaut-turned-farmer, Coop (McConaughey), and his daughter (played first by little Mackenzie Foy, and then as an adult by Jessica Chastain, as the narrative time-loops around) is especially nicely wrought.

This work of cautionary speculative fiction begins in a too-near future where climate change is eroding Earth's resources.  Coop  gets a chance to join a team of explorers who will be flying through a newly discovered wormhole on a quest to find another habitable planet for the human race. (Read more in this week's Good Times)

SINS OF OMISSION

Sorry, but I'm not one of those people who gets all worked up about Oscar's sins of omission. I know my personal taste in movies is way off in the outer limits of mainstream Hollywood culture, so I never expect the movies I like best in any given year to even be in the running, let alone win gold. Imagine my shock in 2009 when my second-favorite film of the previous year, Slumdog Millionaire, actually won the Academy Award for Best Picture. I figured either the Academy was getting smarter or I was getting more lenient in my dotage. Or Door Number Three: the Academy had been taken over by aliens, still the most logical explanation.

(What beat out Slumdog for my favorite movie of 2008? It was the magnificent The Fall, which went on to rank #3 in my Top Ten Movies of the Decade, although—surprise!—it received zero recognition from Academy voters.)

So I have to say that this year's Oscar nominations are at least (and at best) par for the course. This year's safe, "Masterpiece Theatre" entry, The King's Speech, cleans up in nominations—as well it might, excellent as it is in every department. Expanding the Best Picture category to 10 titles gives the Academy a chance to recognize some smaller, dark horse contenders that might formerly have slipped through the cracks at awards time (like the equally excellent—in its own, weird way—Winter's Bone), although we all know the five serious contenders are those whose directors are also nominated in their category. With the addition of Toy Story 3D, that places three of my personal 10 favorite movies of the year on Oscar's list—a pretty remarkable average, all things considered. (Hmmm ... maybe the Academy IS getting smarter...)

(Btw: conventional wisdom says that TS3D won't win because it's also up for Best Animated Feature, which it IS sure to win. Apropos of which, don't miss Wallace Baine's impassioned article calling on the Academy to disband the Animated Feature category and let the worthy animated films duke it out with the live action features. Good point, sez I. It's the message, not the medium; a beguiling film like TS3D (like the utterly wonderful Up last year, also nominated for Best Picture) is equal in emotional resonance, wit, and heart to any other film on the list—and superior to most.)

By now, we all know how often Oscar accolades are cumulative, honoring a body of work (think of John Wayne in Rooster Cogburn, or Paul Newman in The Color of Money, or Martin Scorsese for, erm, The Departed?). Or at least retroactive. Don't get me wrong, Heath Ledger deserved every inch of Oscar gold he won for his breathtaking Joker in The Dark Knight, but you know the Academy was suffering a collective case of (posthumous) bestowers' remorse over not having awarded him the Best Actor Oscar he so richly deserved for Brokeback Mountain a couple of years earlier. The retroactive factor is the primary reason we can expect to see Colin Firth claim the gold this year for The King's Speech, after his fine performance last year in A Single Man lost out to Jeff Bridges—who was winning HIS well-deserved cumulative award for Crazy Heart. (How Bridges himself managed to evade Oscar recognition for so long in such incredible performances as Fearless, and Starman remains one of the great mysteries of the age. Not to mention his criminally un-nominated performance as the scruffy, disorderly children's book author/artist in The Door in the Floor in 2004. He even did his own artwork!)

(Jeff Bridges in The Door in the Floor. Go stream it this minute!)

I'm convinced the main reason Johnny Depp was getting all those nominations for awhile (Finding Neverland; Sweeney Todd) was because Oscar voters neglected to hand him the gold after nominating him for Best Actor in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I'm serious! Nothing against Sean Penn (who won that year for Mystic River), but any great actor can act. What Depp did was create a classic and enduring movie icon, virtually out of whole cloth. Captain Jack Sparrow as we know him was not conceived in the script or out of the director's vision; he sprang as fully-formed as Athena out of the fervid, goofball imagination of Johnny Depp.

But I digress. Despite my habitually lowered expectations, there is one especially glaring omission among this year's Oscar nominees that can neither be ignored nor rationalized away. The category is Best Actress, and, Academy voters, I have two little words to say to you: Noomi Rapace. She is, of course, the woman who played Lisbeth Salander in all three of the "Millenium Trilogy" movies released this year: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. Yes, the films and the performance are in Swedish, but that doesn't stop the incendiary Rapace from giving the iconic female movie performance of the year. It might be argued that the part itself is so iconic, half the actress' work is done for her, but an actress with one iota less of Rapace's guts, sass, vulnerability and smoldering righteousness could never have brought it off. Oscar voters, what were you thinking?

On the other hand, it's nice to see Christian Bale moving into the frontrunner's position in the Supporting Actor race. Although his career trajectory put him on the fast track for leading man roles early on, he's always been a character actor at heart, with a taste for the edgy. (How about his self-imploding insomniac in The Machinist, or downed Air Force pilot Dieter Dengler in Rescue Dawn? And what other actor would even consider American Psycho?) He's paid his Hollywood superhero dues as well, but he's savvy enough to know you don't win Oscars for playing Batman; you win them for playing The Joker. Bale gets his juicy Joker role in The Fighter, as a jittery, crack-addled ex-boxer running on the fumes of a once-promising life (and career), and he makes something pretty amazing out of it.

Finally, in the Heath Ledger Memorial "What's A Guy Gotta Do To Get An Oscar Around Here?" category, consider Christopher Nolan. It's one thing that he's not nominated for directing Inception, one of the year's most intriguing thrill rides (although the film itself made it on to Oscar's Top 10). But neither Nolan nor his phenomenal Memento was even nominated back in 2002. In both cases, Nolan at least snagged a screenwriting nomination (impossibly, he didn't win for the intricate and audacious Memento, losing to the safe bet, Gosford Park), but come on, kids, these movies don't direct themselves.

PS: If you want to see where the next generation of Christopher Nolans is coming from, drop by Open Projector Night on Thursday (Feb 3), 5-8 pm at the Vino Tabi Winery in the Swift Street Courtyard out on the West Side. Presented under the auspices of the Santa Cruz Film Festival, it's a chance for budding filmmakers to bring their short films (10 minutes or less) to show on a big screen before an appreciative audience. No entrance fee; first come, first screened. There'll be wine, munchies, and camaraderie; here's the lowdown.

DREAMTIME

Speaking of movies I didn't get to review, is it too late to put in a good word for Inception?

Walking out of the theater after seeing this movie is like waking from a profound dream state. Slightly disoriented, you're not quite sure what you've seen, the logic of the narrative is starting to feel a little fuzzy around the edges, and the thread of memory is already starting to loop and swirl around like the Giant Dipper. But you know beyond a doubt you've had one hell of a ride.

That this feeling of such seductive, free-fall, psychological probing is catalyzed by a mere movie—not an actual dream state—is one of the many rich pleasures of Christopher Nolan's singular and audacious film. Nolan doesn't do simple. In films like the brilliant Memento (his rookie feature), The Prestige, even the best parts of The Dark Knight, Nolan fools around with the idea of perception, exploring the fine lines between waking and dreaming, sanity and madness. Inception plunges us into the mire of the human subconscious, combining a kinetic dreams-vs-reality thriller plot and amazingly complex dreamlike visual structures in an elaborate story of memory, guilt, love, and redemption.

It's better not to pay too much attention to all the sc-fi exposition and just let yourself be swept up in the various dream-within-dream scenarios. The visuals are outstanding: I especially loved the shot of an entire Paris neighborhood folding up like a piece of origami, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt maneuvering across the walls and ceiling of a rotating dreamstate apartment (a clever shout-out, by the way, to a classic Fred Astaire dance number in Royal Wedding, 1951). And the idea that dreams can be as addictive as any other anti-reality drug is played to poignant effect in the person of Leonardo DiCaprio's classic film noir hero, a hard-boiled professional thief (he steals—and implements—corporate dreams) with a tragic past.

As in The Dark Knight, there are too many chaotic shootouts in speeding vehicles that actually interrupt the action because they go on far too long after the point has been made. (Okay, our heroes are in jeopardy: got it, let's move on…). If I wanted to sit through bullet-ridden car chases, I'd go see The Expendables. From Nolan, I want ideas and audacity, and there's plenty of both in Inception. Don't just sit there: see it now while it's still on the big screen.