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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 →

A Very Literary NY Film Festival

September 25, 2015 in Book Matters, Film Matters, Listing, Reviews

It’s that time again. Along with the autumnal equinox, the Jewish New Year, and, this year, the East Coast visit of the Pope, the New York Film Festival is kicking off its fifty-third lineup with a signature mix of high-brow fare from around the world and mainstream entertainment. As always, a significant portion of the program promises to be literary-minded, so I’ve compiled a list of the adaptations that intrigue me most.

“Arabian Nights Volumes 1, 2, and 3”
Portuguese writer/director Miguel Gomes (and co-writer Mariana Ricardo) uses folk tales from the eponymous book to paint a portrait of Portugal’s current (and rather bleak) economic realities. At roughly 338 minutes, it is not for the faint of heart (The New York Times’s Manohla Dargis called it an “indulgence“) but the ever-maverick Gomes channels a rich, intellectually rigorous absurdism that suits the film’s sketch-within-a-sketch anthology format. Continue Reading →

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