In Defense of Real Science at the Movies
I keep flashing on what a colleague said to me as we exited a critics’ screening of “The Martian.” “Good movie,” he said. “But too much science.” I couldn’t help laughing. His comment reminded me of my favorite scene from “Amadeus” (1984), in which the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II dismisses a new work by composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart by saying, “There are simply too many notes.”
To be clear, I’m not suggesting director Ridley Scott is on the level of Mozart. (Sometimes he’s not even on the level of Salieri; hi, “Prometheus.”) But I do think that you can never have “too much science” in a movie, at least when the science is accurate and well-executed. Matter-of-factly miraculous, science is like cinema at its best. Continue Reading →
Hello to All That
Last weekend I went to Philadelphia for the first time in nearly twenty years. Just writing that sentence fills me with awe. Apparently when you live long enough, you become your own personal time machine.
It was a good visit if discombulating, especially since I made the trek without my dearly departed auto Sadie. I went to college on Philadelphia’s Main Line and, though I grew fond enough of the city, I never liked my alma mater or Pennsylvania overall. Over the years I stopped going back, venturing instead to other parts of the world on the occasions that I left Brooklyn.
This time I took Amtrak, which I enjoyed once I adjusted to the lack of privacy. It reduced the travel to a glamorous ninety minutes door to door, and afforded me the luxury of intermittently dozing and ogling the scenery. But something about going without my wheels to the place where I began my adulthood felt stark. Every time I turned a corner, I expected to run into stricken nineteen-year-old Lisa, bristling with unharnessed hormones and newly discovered anger and fear. It was a pleasure to offer that ghost assurances that I’d become some of what she’d hoped to be. It was a pleasure to catch up with friends over gorgeous meals and music.
On the way back to New York, my train was halted, and it reminded me of my move to Brooklyn from Pennsylvania decades before. If you have short pockets and all the patience in the world, you can take commuter rails the entire way between the two cities. It’s something I did constantly in the summer after college, when I’d perched in a professor’s house and shuttled to NYC for job interviews. Continue Reading →
Q&A: Team ‘He Named Me Malala’
“Just because she has become a P.R. machine doesn’t mean she’s not the real deal,” said director Davis Guggenheim of Malala Yousafzai, the eighteen-year-old education activist who was shot in the head in 2012 and lived to tell her story. We were at New York’s The London hotel, where, along with producers Laurie MacDonald and Walter Parkes, Guggenheim had convened to discuss “He Named Me Malala,” their documentary about the Pakistani teenager who had become a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, opening October 2. At times, the conversation, though polite, became quite charged.
Because he was in a room of mostly American journalists, one of the first questions lobbed at Guggenheim was, “How, as filmmakers, did you navigate the fact that Malala has become a brand?”
“I understand why you have to ask that,” said Guggenheim, with a professorial patience. “But I live in a very nice Hollywood ghetto and my process is to make the stories I want to make, which is very separate from brand-making.” (Among the director’s previous projects is the Academy Award-winning eco-documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”) Continue Reading →