Wednesday, October 29, 2014

''INTERSTELLAR'' is a silly, ridiculous sci fi movie that could have been an important 'cli fi' movie with a different script but....

HOW TO PRONOUNCE "Interstellar" movie title? ----- re a reporter in Hollywod pronounced the title of the movie as "INNER-steller" when in fact the correct way to say it is "inter-STELL-ar". ------------------Where did he ever get the inner thing there? SMILE. ----------------No biggie but for future reference see this video explains it better; ------------------ http://youtu.be/_Hc_LrElwjs

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UPDATE! CLI FI MOVIE AWARDS AIM TO REACH HOLLYWOOD PLAYERS!
http://entertainthis.usatoday.com/2014/10/23/climate-fiction-cliffies-awards-movies/

NOTE BEFORE READING BELOW: -- "Interstellar" suggests the survival of the species may depend on enough people extending a sense of empathy beyond their immediate family. It acts as a tribute to those adventurers of the past who were able to sideline short-termism in the service of exploration. But the cast agreed what would be needed to prevent such action from becoming necessary in the first place was a rapid and concerted effort.

and one comment at the Guardian review said it well: from ClareLondon -- ''It is typical but it irks me that someone as rich and famous as Michael Caine did not 'believe' in climate change - while knowing nothing about the subject.
Then, once he knew something about it, suddenly he 'believes' in it.
I just wish the media during this last generation of internet had not allowed anonymous right-wing trolling which has totally confused the educational message for a huge number of people, who seem to continue to believe that it's a matter of 'belief' rather than scientific fact.
So frustrating.
Also frustrating is hearing about Hollywood stars 'trying to support small ethical businesses'.
Look - Hollywood stars - what you need to do is proclaim the message loud and clear that you will not travel on aeroplanes anymore unless it is for a medical emergency in your immediate family - that you will travel only in hybrid or electric cars, that you will stop supporting the meat industry and go vegetarian and that you will vastly reduce the huge CO2 emitting contraptions in your homes, including no longer using your heated pools.
That kind of thing would be useful. 'Trying' to 'support' small ethical local businesses; is not going to do rat shit towards reducing emisisons and saving humanity.
When will you lot wake up? When will politicians wake up?
Maddening. And no - I do not want to watch a film where any effort to curb climate change is replaced by a boy's adventure story concerned with fleeing the planet. Where does humanity go? This is an obscenity.
Save the planet. Act on climate change first.

 ''INTERSTELLAR'' -- al169 minutes of it! -- is a great sci fi movie that could have been an even better 'cli fi' movie but....that mvoie will have to wait for another director, another time, another Hollywood awards season.

As it is, Christopher Nolan's INTERSTELLAR achieves all it set out to achieve and more, and it's getting strong, powerful, positive reviews worldwide as we speak. It's a sci fi lover's sci fi movie. It's a sci fi geek's sci fi wet dream. It's the sci fi movie of all time (at least until some other director dreams up an even better story with even better visuals). But...

 But think of what INTERSTELLAR could have been had it focused more on the climate =-changed world on view in the first part of the movie and left the sci fi part out of the picture completely. As it is, the movie is pure escapist entertainment, food for thought but almost a total waste of time.

 Christopher, we are at war! The Earth is on fire. And you are going on and on about wormholes and journeys to other planets?

Imagine if a Hollywood studio could put together a movie with the power of ON THE BEACH in the 1950s, but this time an ON THE BEACH of the 2020s -- and not about nuclear war and nuclear winter but about the devasating impacts of climate change and man-made global warming. AGW. The IPCC reports. The fate of the Earth, the fate of the human species.

 A movie is just a movie, and Hollywood is mostly there to entertain us. But imagine if instead of focusing on the sci fi silliness of wormholes and black holes, ''INTERCLIMATE'' focused more on the reality of life in an AGW-impacted Midwest farming region where the crops were failing and the food (and water!) were scarce.

Shades of Paolo Bacigalupi's 2015 cli fi novel-in-the-works THE WATER KNIFE (due out for public reading in May of 2015).

And a character named {Gary} Cooper who looks like he just stepped out of a John Steinbeck novel, with maybe a dash of Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD and some of Margaret Atwood's apocalyptic scenarios linked in for good measure -- and focus not on Cooper's silly search for life in outer space since there is only more genertion left to survive on Earth but rather on what the next 30 generations of humans HERE ON THIS EARTH are going to face IF WE DO NOT deal with the reality of a warming world and ocean acidification and rising sea levels and globam warming impact events worldwide and not just for white blue eyued movie actors from North America to entertain fellow white movie fans from North America (and the global market, too: Hollywood is not stupid; they know a good money maker when they produce one!)...

 The ''caretaker generation''? We need cli fi movies in the future about the caretaker generations to come, over the next 500 years.

Time is runing out. And all Hollywood can offer is silly sci fi extravaganza space epics with no basis in reality and no real usefulness other than to spend three hours forgetting about the real world and the real climate issues we humans face?

 I wonder what people like Joe Romm and Andy Revkin and Chris Shaw and Elizabeth Kolbert and Nathaniel Rich and Barbara Kingsilver will say about INTERSTELLAR after they see it? Is this what the world needs now? Sci fi escapism? Sci fi silliness?

US$160 million spent on movie to take people away from the very real problems we face now as a species vis a vis climate change impacts events coming down the road within the next 30 generations? Is this all that Hollywood can offer? No! Hollywood can rise to the challenge and start greenlighting some good and important cli fi movies. There's still time for cli fi to make an impact in Hollywood. But at the same time, as we all know that time has maybe already run out. And we are doomed, doomed.

And all Hollywood can offer is more escapism?

Even some of the stars of INTERSTELLER agree the movie was offbase and waste of time.

The Guardian notes that ''Interstellar'' suggests the survival of the species may depend on enough people extending a sense of empathy beyond their immediate family. It acts as a tribute to those adventurers of the past who were able to sideline short-termism in the service of exploration. But the cast agreed what would be needed to prevent such action from becoming necessary in the first place was a rapid and concerted effort.
“I think mother nature’s gonna be just fine,” said Matthew McConaughey. “But we might not. The masses have to have a personal stake in things to take action.”
Ann Hathaway pointed to societal structures as a cause of such inertia. “I don’t think we’ve learned how to broach with the topic with your average person that your life is being controlled by a small group of people who are themselves controlled by greed.”
But to be fair, both actors, as well as Chastain and Nolan, reported that they nonetheless remained optimistic, and had faith in the sentiment of the film’s tagline: “The end of Earth will not be the end of us.”
Caine, however, remained sceptical. “If Earth screws up, I think we all go,” he said. “How many people can go through a black hole in a rocket? It’s not a bus.”

Asked if he was taking measures to try reduce his own ecological footprint, Caine jokingly protested that he was still making up for a frugal youth. “I was so poor for so long. I didn’t use anything or eat very much so I figured the world owed me a debt. Now I’ve been eating very well and have had a big car for a long time.”
His fellow cast-members banged the ecological drum a little harder, with vegan Jessica Chastain championing “meat-free Mondays” and Anne Hathaway saying she timed her showers and tried to support small, ethical businesses. Nolan, meanwhile, expressed enthusiasm for pooling resources, “gathering people in one place, like a movie theatre – you can save an enormous amount of electricity”.
McConaughey’s character is mentored by a man played by Michael Caine and loosely based on the astrophysicist Kip Thorne. Thorne’s work both inspired and informed the film, but Caine, 81, said that until he spoke with the scientist, the only wormholes he’d been familiar with were those in his garden.
Caine, who has now worked with Nolan six times, said his own re-evaluation of the reality of climate change coincided with his making the film. “When I went to do this movie in LA two years ago I left on 2 October. It was 86 degrees here and when I got to Los Angeles it was pouring with rain. That is the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to be. That worried me. I’d never believed in global warming and I went: ‘Whoops. Maybe there is something in it.’”

How Interstellar made Michael Caine think again about climate change

Mother nature’s going to be fine – but we might not be, adds Matthew McConaughey, star of film that addresses humans’ place in the cosmos

''Interstellar'' suggests the survival of the species may depend on enough people extending a sense of empathy beyond their immediate family. It acts as a tribute to those adventurers of the past who were able to sideline short-termism in the service of exploration. But the cast agreed what would be needed to prevent such action from becoming necessary in the first place was a rapid and concerted effort.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why would you want ask an 81 year man what he is doing about his ecological footprint? Give him a break, he's 81.

Anonymous said...

It is typical but it irks me that someone as rich and famous as Michael Caine did not 'believe' in climate change - while knowing nothing about the subject.
Then, once he knew something about it, suddenly he 'believes' in it.
I just wish the media during this last generation of internet had not allowed anonymous right-wing trolling which has totally confused the educational message for a huge number of people, who seem to continue to believe that it's a matter of 'belief' rather than scientific fact.
So frustrating.
Also frustrating is hearing about Hollywood stars 'trying to support small ethical businesses'.
Look - Hollywood stars - what you need to do is proclaim the message loud and clear that you will not travel on aeroplanes anymore unless it is for a medical emergency in your immediate family - that you will travel only in hybrid or electric cars, that you will stop supporting the meat industry and go vegetarian and that you will vastly reduce the huge CO2 emitting contraptions in your homes, including no longer using your heated pools.
That kind of thing would be useful. 'Trying' to 'support' small ethical local businesses; is not going to do rat shit towards reducing emisisons and saving humanity.
When will you lot wake up? When will politicians wake up?
Maddening. And no - I do not want to watch a film where any effort to curb climate change is replaced by a boy's adventure story concerned with fleeing the planet. Where does humanity go? This is an obscenity.
Save the planet. Act on climate change first.

DANIELBLOOM said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2014/10/27/interstellar-does-not-push-global-warming-fraud

As someone who embraces as much mystery as possible before seeing a movie, especially a Christopher Nolan movie, I'm being careful in my reading of the incoming "Interstellar" reviews, which are so far pretty good. With 18 reviews in (the moratorium on reviews dropped today), Nolan's big budgeted nod to his favorite film, Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," holds a 72% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes.
All I know and want to know about "Interstellar" comes from the trailer. Matthew McConaughey plays a devoted family man called to go on a deep space voyage in order to save humanity from a planet Earth that is rapidly becoming inhospitable. There has been some speculation about just what Nolan's explanation will be for the deterioration of the planet; would he go the political route and pretend Global Warming is real.
Personally, I didn't think he would. He's too smart for that. Nolan is an artist whose colors come in only three shades: theme, theme, and theme. Other than his extraordinary abilities as a storyteller and love for humanity, what I love most about Nolan is how he talks about contemporary society and issues without, well, talking about them.
Nolan's movies will never be dated. For example, the last two chapters in the "Dark Knight" trilogy had a lot to say about America's War on Terror, but did so in a way that wouldn't put people off or give the story an expiration date to future generations.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, "Interstellar" takes the same approach by shying away from the divisive, anti-science hoax that is Global Warming:
Citizens of the world convinced that our planet and civilization are now in a possibly irreversible decline will readily embrace the postulation of the script, by the Nolan brothers Jonathan and Christopher, that life here will shortly be unsustainable. Shrewdly, the writers don't reflexively blame the deterioration on the catch-all “global warming” or “climate change,” but rather upon severe “blight” resembling the Dust Bowl of the 1930s; wheat and other produce are done for, while corn growers, such as Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), may have a bit of time left.
This is smart storytelling, as well. Why alienate those of us who believe in science with a bunch of made-up, left-wing Climate Change nonsense?
Maybe Nolan does believe in Climate Change. I don't know, and that's the point. This kind of restraint and storytelling maturity is one of the reasons he's batting a thousand with critics and filmgoers, and on a streak we haven't seen from any filmmaker since the early days of Spielberg.

John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC