RECOMMENDATION: Voyage to the Planets

I can't remember now how I first heard about Voyage to the Planets, a two part documentary about space travel, but it's one of the most educational and compelling I've ever seen. Made by the BBC—the best documentary filmmakers in the world—they pose the question, What would happen if mankind were ready to make its next great venture to the stars? The result is a 2 episode faux documentary, a future history of astronauts on one long "grand tour" of our solar system: Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Io, Europa, Saturn... in real life, such a voyage would never be attempted, but it is a clever construct to hook the audience, and it works.

Five astronauts embark on a six year voyage collecting samples from planets, facing hazards at every turn. It's crazy. It's the kind of shit you dreamt about when you were a kid. It is, in fact, the real Star Trek.

What also makes it really appealing to me is that Zoë, my 5 month old daughter, is among the generation who will explore the stars as described in this program. If the earliest launch for an unmanned probe to Europa is 2015 (when Zoë will be 8), then a manned launch to Europa is sure to follow 20-25 years later, which puts her at 28-32, exactly the right age range. It's not that I even want Zoë to be an astronaut, but it's exciting to feel how tangible that possibility is. What mysteries will they uncover in the last great adventure in human history?

The program employs another tactic very effectively: they take pains to get you to care about the astronauts from the very beginning. Like any documentary, you are documenting the explorers as much as you are what the explorers are exploring. You want to know who they are, how they get along, what their whimsies and foibles are. Once you care about these people, you care what happens to them. My wife didn't think she'd like this documentary, but every time the astronauts suited up, she was stressed out for them. Given the range of hazards they face on their voyage, there's no shortage of entertainment watching them insinuate their way to safety.

And did I forget to mention that one of the astronauts was named Zoë?

The Fountain

It's very rare I see a "grey matter" film, which is a film so densely packed with motifs and themes that my brain reels with the information it's receiving. Darran Aronofsky's The Fountain is such a film. After a half hour, I had to pause the film—too overloaded to continue—and return to it a couple of days later.

When I first heard about The Fountain years ago, I remember the production running into lots of problems, ending with the studio pulling the plug, and ultimately deconstructing and auctioning off all the sets. Two years later, Aronofsky recast and refinanced the film at half its original budget and shot in Canada instead of Australia.

Here's an excellent synopsis of it:

The Fountain is an odyssey about one man’s thousand-year struggle to save the woman he loves. His epic journey begins in 16th-century Spain, where conquistador Tomas (Hugh Jackman) commences his search for the Fountain of Youth, the lengendary entity believed to grant immortality. As modern-day scientist Tommy Creo, he desperately struggles to find a cure for the cancer that is killing his beloved wife, Isabel (Rachel Weisz). Traveling through deep space as a 26th-century astronaut, Tom begins to grasp the mysteries that have consumed him for a millennium. The three stories converge into one truth, as the Thomas of all periods—warrior, scientist, and explorer—cones to terms with life, love, death and rebirth.—Source

On the DVD's special features, I watched Hugh Jackman doing rehearsals and gained instant respect for him as an actor. These are rehearsals and Jackman is committing himself completely to the moment even though the rehearsal will never be in the finished film. Whenever I hear an actor say they prefer not to do rehearsals because they feel it "ruins their spontaneity", I think of the dedication of actors like Jackman, where you can actually see the strength of their success: they enjoy performing and are unafraid to immerse themselves in the "unknown" to find that perfect performance.

Anyway, it's not hard to see why Aronofsky has said, "I feel like every movie I've ever made, ever action I've ever done, has been for the sole purpose of making this one film." He put his heart into The Fountain, and it shows. Make sure you see The Fountain... and be ready for your head to start spinning.

SPOILER ALERT—IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THIS FILM, STOP READING!
This film is jaw-droppingly beautiful. The lighting and composition is amazing. The production and costume design is meticulous. The makeup is realistic. The CGI is flawless. Excellence is a word reserved for Aronofsky's level of filmmaking.

And Aronofsky's clever use of motifs and themes is simply astonishing. Hair symbolizes life. Death and life are interconnected. The characters move from darkness into light. The bright amber nebula encases a dying star. The spaceship is a sphere, like an egg or sperm impregnating the nebula. The tree sap is white and creamy, like breastmilk. On the motifs alone, Aronofsky has done a remarkable job.

REVIEW: The Break-Up

A "clever romantic comedy" is what the back of the box said about The Break-Up with Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn and wow, was that ever misleading advertising. The Break-Up was so un-funny and so un-romantic that my wife and I had to stop watching after half an hour—and we never do that.

Vince Vaughn is a talented comedic actor, right? In Wedding Crashers, his motor mouth antics must have made it a challenge for the film crew to keep quiet during takes. I'm not always a fan of Vaughn's schtick, yet certain roles often work well for him.

Jennifer Aniston, too, knows her chops, as her many years on Friends have proven.

So what gives? Why was this film so bad? Well, that's just it—it wasn't bad per se, just that it was poorly advertised: instead of a romantic comedy with some dramatic moments, it's actually a romantic drama with some comedic moments. Their quarrels in the first half hour are uncomfortably real, and thus not really funny at all. Honestly, what's so funny about watching people fight with such sincere malice?

I think I know what happened. If I had to guess, The Break-Up's shooting script was probably very clever and very funny, and garnered enough buzz to attract several big (comedic) names: Justin Long, Jason Bateman, Ann Margaret, Vincent d'Onofrio, Cole Hauser, Judy Davis. So, great, you've got all these great supporting actors, and you've got two amazing lead actors known for their comedic talent... so it's got to be a romantic comedy, right? Hardly. Because Vince Vaughn is notorious for his improvisational tangents, his improvs with Anison were very very good material... but only for a drama. And at times, Aniston's line delivery is so resonant that it hurts. She's clearly as gifted doing drama as she is with comedy.

The problem is that the ultra-serious tone of their fights starts the movie, so any subsequent humor has a wet towel draped over it. You keep cringing—when is the next painfully real argument going to happen? It's more angst-filled than enjoyable.

The Break-Up shows that you can have all the elements in the dish, but if they don't work together harmoniously, then you've got zilch. Setting the proper tone at the start of a story is paramount, and The Break-Up's director, the relatively unknown Peyton Reed, gave too much liberty to his comedic actors to do their thing. Everyone might have fared better, then, to clearly define the movie's tone to everyone while in pre-production... if we improv, we improv around this particular kind of tone, i.e. we don't want serious/angry, we want silly/angry.

Apparently, the critics agreed with me: 113 of 168 reviews were unfavorable. The math says that's a pitiful 33%, a big fat "F" no matter how hard you spin it.

Ready for the plot reversal?

Production Cost: $52 million
Worldwide Gross: $203 million!

Which means that The Break-Up makes a profit purely because of its star appeal, even though—as a romantic comedy—the movie stunk. Wonderful. More of the same is sure to follow.

REVIEW: Spam Sieve for Max OS X

For the sake of posterity only, here is my Macupdate.com mini-review of a cool little Mac app that kills Spam dead:

I usually don't write reviews unless I am on the extreme end of the spectrum about a product, but Spam Sieve is so exceptional in every way that it deserves to have a review which says so.

My feelings about spam are something close to obsessive compulsive; we shouldn't have to pay extra money to weed out unnecessary clatter. And yet, it appears we must. Thus, if I am forced to find a good spam filter, I want the best one for the least amount of money and not a product I'll have to upgrade two years from now when the company goes out of business. When I commit to an application, I'm monogamous for life, so I make my decisions very carefully.

I am a Eudora 6 user and its junk mail filter is not 100% reliable. More importantly, its spam-labeling process, while it allows you to label some email as junk (and some email as not junk), is not transparent which makes it very hard to improve the filters. It's a "cross your fingers" type of approach and that doesn't work for me.

Spam Sieve, however, has already blocked 99% of all my spam in only three days of "training". This is enough to make me buy the program; I mean, come on -- if it's this good in only 3 days, then how good will it be in 3 months? Since it learns over time, I feel confident that $25 is a small price to pay to know I won't have to look at spam in my In Box ever again.

Bonus tracks: Spam Sieve is transparent by showing you how its "corpus" of words is judged: "$40 million" might be used 4 times for spam emails and 1 time for good emails—so you can delete the term (or not) if you think that's a bad word to use to judge spam. Also, its dock icon closes automatically when you close down Eudora. Oh, and you choose between photo-realistic and cartoon dock icons. Super swanky!

REVIEW: The Passion of The Christ

First things first:

1) If you're a practicing Christian, you might be offended by this.
2) If you're overly sensitive to profanity or anything profane, you might be offended by this.
3) If you're a fire and brimstone bible-thumper, I guarantee that you will be offended by this.

BUT HEY, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Wow, that's better. I feel like I can let my hair down and say what I want without having my house shit-bombed. Which is bad. Being shit-bombed is so... icky. I can barely clean my cat box without throwing up in my mouth a little. So being shit-bombed would definitely make me spew.

The other day, I finally got around to seeing Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ, the film that everyone called him nuts for doing because it was in the original Hebrew, Latin and Aramaic. Maybe I missed the memo going around about it, but... what was this film about exactly? Jesus gets nabbed, he gets punished, then crucified. Um... yeah, I already knew all that. Why do I really need to see two Roman sadists flay a man to death? Can you say, "gratuitous"?

Sure, if you're a Christian, and Jesus was the man you believe is God Incarnate and you've taken him into your heart and know the story inside and out... hell yeah, you should see this film. But don't expect a story... it's just a series of events strung together without any new insights about its subject matter. Except maybe that you understand why Christians are so pissed off at the Jews for insisting Jesus get the nail treatment. That was pretty nasty.

Having said all that, I must say that Gibson does a bloody great job at showing you what Ancient Gallilee would have been like: the Romans speak Latin as naturally as if it were modern day Italian, and the garb they wear is not as pristine as we have seen in other films... instead, everything is dingy and dust-covered, as one would expect it to be in Ancient Gallilee. This film, for all of its lack of story, is real... almost too real.

The one thing Gibson did that sent me into fevered eye-rolling convulsions was his overuse of slow-motion. When a director uses slow-mo, it's intended as a tool to savor the moment, as if he's saying to the audience, "Here! Watch this! Isn't this amazing!?!?" Slow motion can be used with stunning effectiveness as in The Matrix or The Untouchables, but—like many cool techniques—it can be overused, too. While many love Peter Jackson and worship him as a demi-god, Jackson is waaaaay guilty of this, especially in Return of The King. Like, dude, we get it already... Sauran is being vanquished—why do we have to see slow-mo reactions from every character in Middle Earth??? Gibson showed Jesus' capture with so many slow motion takes that I thought it would be an hour before we would get to the next scene.

Still, Passion is beautifully shot, and—simply because of its subject matter and how accurately it seems to be portrayed—is worth seeing. If you're a Christian or revere the teachings of Jesus, then you absolutely must see it. Just don't expect much of a plot.

One final thought. In the time of Mosaic Law, it must have been revolutionary for anyone to pray for their own murderers. Truth be told, it remains a little radical. Sure, to read about someone forgiving their killers is one thing, but to actually see a man experience so much torture and anguish, to have his body savagely flayed and then nailed to a piece of wood, and then still pray for his punishers... well, it just blows me away.