"Please welcome two time Academy Award winner and Academy governor, Tom Hanks!"
"The last time ten films were nominated for best picture was 1943. The world was at war and Casablanca
took home the big prize. It's now time to find out which one of this year's ten great films
joins a list that includes that Bogart and Bergman classic.
And the winner is-"
Let me ask you a question:
Do you own James Cameron's Avatar?
Have you seen it a second time? Me neither.
All its visual splendor, innovation, ambition just wasn't enough to suffer through its 178 minutes
of derivative, heavy handed storytelling again.
"What the hell have you people been smoking out there?"
Now Avatar isn't the first or the fiftieth larger than life blockbuster with a mediocre narrative.
But it's perhaps the worst the worst film to be nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards.
Certainly the worst to be favored.
"And the winner is...
The Hurt Locker. Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, Nicolas Chartier..."
Its loss to The Hurt Locker in 2010 felt like an assertion of values for an industry that was showing
all the signs of a gradual amnesia about what constitutes a great film.
For the record, Avatar didn't astonish me visually, either. It doubled down on gimmicks that I despise,
namely 3D. This is part of what makes me so sad about Christopher Nolan's Interstellar.
In a world of James Camerons and Goerge Lucases, Nolan is a warrior for stylistic purity.
Whereas others seem convinced that cinema needs to move in revolutionary new directions to survive,
Nolan sees that the possibilities of two dimensions haven't even come close to being exhausted,
let alone, fully realized.
He's among the last to fight for everything we treasure about celluloid.
For this reason and others, it may be unfair to compare Interstellar to Avatar,
but I don't think it's unreasonable either.
Both films are big, muscular operations that collapse onto weak skeletons.
Both force themselves to use characters as vehicles for exposition, then choose to use them as megaphones
for awkward philosophical declarations.
"Love isn't something we invented. It's observable, powerful. It has to mean something."
Of course, Interstellar is noticeably smarter than Avatar but that's not always to its credit.
The film operates on so many levels, it's hard to identify which one is meant to be the emotional core.
If it's supposed to be the relationship with Cooper, Matthew McConaughey and his daughter,
then why does Nolan devote so little time to it?
Like with the blight destroying Earth's crops, inspiring Cooper's mission to find new worlds,
most of the father-daughter relationship has to be inferred by the viewer.
Elsewhere in the film, we're subjected to multiple explanations of relativity and gravity and wormholes.
Exactly where we want the movie to force inference, it lingers.
Where we need more exploration and screen time, it holds back.
Now these criticisms are not new to Nolan's films. None of them are more interested in people than concepts.
With smaller budgets and simpler ideas, he was better at keeping everything self-contained.
Memento and Batman Begins, for example, are triumphs of airtight storytelling.
But as Nolan's reach and funding grows, things seem to be escaping his control.
After seeing Inception, my first thought was, "Where does he go from here?" I didn't think you could get any
headier than dreams within dreams. I didn't think you could do anymore of that signature three scene
intercutting without the novelty dying. I was convince that Inception would force Nolan to regroup.
And what came next was a tedious final Batman film, then this.
While there's less intercutting in Interstellar- the only instance comes two thirds through the film
and it's predictably rousing- The ideas are even headier, only now there are too many for any one to get its due.
The film attempts to accommodate wormholes, time travel, fifth dimensional beings
that may or may not be us from the future, relativity, survival, and love, all while advancing a very
anti-Avatar message about the environment. We're not meant to restore Earth's delicate biosphere.
We're meant to leave it behind. Even Kubrick would have struggled with that much of a conceptional payload.
Indeed, it's impossible not to think of 2001: A Space Odyssey while watching Interstellar.
The comparisons it invites aren't generous to the latter.
Like Nolan, Kubrick is famous for a lack of humanity in his characters,
but where Nolan's leads are often dry and tiresome, Kubrick's are cold and punishing,
and those qualities have value in respect to the film's impact. Note the average length of shots
in the two movies. You'd be hard pressed to find many shots longer than five seconds in Interstellar,
but it would be difficult to find many less than twenty seconds in 2001.
Kubrick forces you to come to terms with something before he lets you see the next thing.
Nolan is already five shots ahead of you before you grasp how one image fits with the rest.
With Kubrick, there's always a you-sized hole demanding engagement, mutating based on when, where and who
you are. Nolan's whiplash of action encourages passivity. Other criticisms were matched by
unintentional laughter in the theater. Anne Hathaway's mawkish oration on love:
"Maybe it means something more, something we can't yet understand."
Matt Damon's cameo, a lesson in the perils of too much secrecy prior to a film's release.
Jessica Chastain was given basically nothing of substance to work with and Michael Caine's multiple
recitations of Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night" play like something I might write
into a screenplay, which is no compliment.
Maybe all this is too harsh. the film, after all, is a far cry from bad. Still, I find myself coming down harder
on Nolan than on many of his peers, like a teacher might on a favorite student.
I have a real stake in Christopher Nolan's work and the kind of work he represents.
I enjoy intimate dramas as much as the next filmgoer, but cinema without 70 millimeter Imax spectaculars
is an incomplete form and Nolan is basically the last name in original mega movies with profound ambitions.
That's why you should want to see a film like Interstellar: Because it would be a shame to miss it.
Grandeur, intelligence, spectacle and story are not mutually exclusive and Chris Nolan is stretching
the potential of cinema toward their union like no other director.
But we have to stick to our assertion of values about what constitutes a great film.
Internal consistencies, storytelling that challenges, not confuses the viewer,
and dynamic, deeply drawn characters. These are standards that should remain unaffected by scope
or singularity of vision.
Hey everybody, thanks for watching. I am back from Paris. The beard's a little bit longer.
I am a little bit more rested but I am really excited to get back to work on these videos.
I've never come back from a vacation and wanted to go back to work before, so this is a really new and
really awesome feeling, so thank you guys for making that possible by supporting this channel and
these videos on my Patreon page. You can click right here to pledge as little as a dollar.
Anything helps to keep this channel going, still need to build it up a little bit. It's just barely financially feasible
for me, but you've been amazing so far. So thank you so much for that.
You're going to see another video next Wednesday and another video next Wednesday after that!
And I am very, very pumped, like I said, to be back at work making the Nerdwriter.
So, bye!
