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In Defense of Real Science at the Movies

October 8, 2015 in Book Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Film Matters

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 →

Q&A: Team ‘He Named Me Malala’

October 3, 2015 in Book Matters, Country Matters, Feminist Matters, Film Matters

“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 →

We’re All Hotel Clerks

September 26, 2015 in Book Matters, Cat Lady Matters, Quoth the Raving, Spirit Matters

There are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor, who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the willful guests.–Katherine Mansfield

I came across this in Tracy Daugherty’s Joan Didion biography, The Last Love Song, which I’ve been reading thirstily and disdainfully. I don’t mind the anonymity the quote describes, but I’ve been flashing on it as I’ve been watching the day turn to night. Sun’s turning all kinds of neon bruises that’ll disappear with her grand exit, permakitten Grace and I are admiring from the kitchen window, and there’s this feeling–immense, bottomless–of all of us passing through each other without leaving a dent. What’s interesting is how completely I’ve come to accept this. It’s not sad, not really. It’s just the fourth dimension, slicing through our existential chatter.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy