Asking the Wrong Questions

One of the nice things about Oppenheimer is that it's spurred so much conversation on so many different topics. It's been a while since we had a movie that, while being a popular entertainment with a very large audience, encouraged people to talk about history, accountability, art, and the limits of biography. On top of my review of the film at Lawyers, Guns & Money , I also posted there about the issue of political criticism , in the context of the conversation that has sprung up around its choice to center the story of the atomic bomb and its first wartime deployment on the (white) man who made it rather than the people it killed and sickened. Fellow LGM blogger Cheryl Rofer, a scientist with roots in the nuclear community who worked with Manhattan Project alumni and is a self-described member of the "cult of Oppenheimer" has also contributed several discussions of the film's historical accuracy (or lack of same) and is, to my knowledge, planning more. A...

Without really planning it, all of my recent film and TV writing has ended up at Lawyers, Guns & Money , while the book-related writing has ended up here. I'm not entirely sure why that happened—I tend to divide posts between the two blogs based mostly on vibes, so I guess things just broke that way. But because I know that some of these posts will be of interest to AtWQ readers, and out of a general desire to maintain a proper record, here are some of the media posts I made over at that blog in the last few weeks: First up, a review of the National Geographic/Disney+ series A Small Light , a biopic of Miep Gies, one of the people who concealed eight Jews, including the family of Anne Frank, in a secret annex in an Amsterdam warehouse, and who discovered and preserved Anne's diary after the annex was betrayed and its inhabitants taken to the death camps. I found a lot to admire about the show, while also wondering whether it was capable of facing up to the true, awful real...

At some point in the last decade, Christopher Nolan became known as a purveyor of experiences. Not movies, not stories, but immersive sensory extravaganzas that one must delve into completely unprepared, or risk losing some ineffable quality that can never be regained. It's hard to pinpoint when this transformation occurred—it doesn't seem to have been in place for Inception , which was marketed rather plainly as a movie about a team who conduct heists in people's dreams. But that film, and especially its reception as a philosophical text, seem to have been the tipping point. The increasing weaponization of FOMO, through which Hollywood has learned to market as unmissable, go-in-knowing-nothing experiences even those movies that could easily have been sold on the strength of their plot, also played a part. Which is how we arrived at 2020, a year in which nobody should even consider spending two hours in a closed, climate-controlled room with two hundred strangers, and fou...

For several days now, I've been debating with myself whether Interstellar is a bad film that does several things quite well, or a good film that has had the misfortune of having to shoulder, and justify, its creator's reputation.  At some point in the last half-decade, popular culture decided--erroneously, if you ask me--that Christopher Nolan is a purveyor of Deep, Serious entertainments.  And so his latest film, a fairly meat-and-potatoes space exploration story, comes burdened not only with its audience's expectations, but with its creator's need to live up to them.  Every minute of Interstellar drips with a self-importance, a portentousness, that the film itself--which is pretty but overlong, heartfelt but silly, ambitious but scattershot--can't hope to earn.  Just look at the way the film's trailers and promotional materials worked so hard to create a sense of mystery about what is ultimately a very straightforward premise, not because the film needs it--...

I've been thinking for some time about how fandom reacts when its beloved auteurs fail.  When someone like Aaron Sorkin produces something as preachy, self-satisfied, and misogynistic as The Newsroom , fandom reacts with dismay, but is that surprise justified?  In Sorkin's case, all of these flaws were baked into his work going back as far as Sports Night , and they were ignored, excused, and forgiven because what he was producing was of such high quality.  Is it really surprising that a writer who has been showered with unconditional praise and adulation should feel free to indulge their worst impulses, and revel in bad habits they might previously have worked to curtail?  I mention this because going into The Dark Knight Rises , I was determined not to make this sort of mistake.  The previous volume in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight , was an excellent film--thrilling, sharply plotted, one of the best superhero films of the last decade....

Between them, Niall Harrison , Adam Roberts , and, in the comments to my post about it (starting here ), Brian Francis Slattery, have talked me over to their reading of Inception --the film and the concept at its core--as a metaphor for storytelling and the artifice of filmmaking (which probably means that my original take on the film, as an SFnal story about learning the world, is, if not off-base, then probably no more productive than obsessing over whether Cobb is still dreaming in the last scene).  As I say to Brian, however, I think that as an analogy to storytelling, dreaming is a very poor fit.  Niall is right to point out that most of us don't dream as vividly and imaginatively as the more common filmic represenation of dreams--vividly colored surrealist landscapes--would have us believe.  My dreams, the ones I remember at least, usually feature familiar settings and actions (though I did once dream that I was investigating the murder of Kermit the frog--I'm stil...

Has there ever been a film as hotly anticipated, as burdened with expectations, as Christopher Nolan's Inception ?  It's certainly hard to think of one, nor to credit all the things that we thought, believed, or hoped that this film would accomplish.  It would rescue one of the dullest and most underperforming summer blockbuster seasons in recent memory.  It would combine the best qualities of all of last year's science fiction films--the stunning visuals of Avatar , the originality of District 9 , the enthusiastic fannishness of Star Trek , the detail-oriented fannishness of Watchmen , the attention to character of Moon --into a single perfect storm of SFnal moviemaking.  It would prove, once and for all, that a film that both demonstrated intelligence and demanded it from its viewers could triumph at the box office.  It would put an end to the plague of sequels and remakes that has blighted Hollywood's blockbuster production for the better part of a decade....

When Batman Begins was released and the entire internet was falling over itself, going on about the best superhero film ever and My God, the Realism, I found myself left out of the celebrations. I liked the film well enough, but I thought it was held back from greatness, or for that matter even very goodness, by the same flaws which, earlier this year, marred my enjoyment of Iron Man . The dialogue was atrocious, the villains forgettable, and the plot trapped in the well-worn grooves of the superhero origin story, and thus completely predictable. It was only at its very end that Batman Begins --again setting an example that Iron Man would later follow--made me sit up and take notice, in a scene in which Gordon uses the Bat Signal for the first time and makes a tentative alliance with Batman. Even as he chooses to tolerate Batman's presence in the city, Gordon notes that that presence is an escalation in the terms of the battle between law and lawlessness, and that its consequ...

I confess, in spite of the praise heaped on Christopher Nolan's The Prestige from almost all quarters, I was somewhat reluctant to go see it. Similar praise, after all, had been heaped on the Christopher Priest novel of the same name, of which the film is an adaptation, and it was and still remains one of the most unimpressive pieces of fiction it has ever been my misfortune to read (admittedly, the soporific experience of reading The Prestige takes on an almost rosy glow when compared to the one I had reading Priest's Clarke-winning The Separation , a very strong contender for the worst novel of my reading life). To my relief and delight, Nolan's version of the story is truly as fine as its fans would have had me believe--a clever, cleverly-made film, at the same time suspenseful and thoughtful, and full to the brim of observations about stage magic, showmanship, and the sacrifices that both entail. Most interesting to me, as one of the half-dozen people on the planet w...