Interstellar vs the world. Mediocrity like most things of an insidious nature is rarely blatant. It doesnt yell at you to let it in and then threaten to blow your house down. No it rings the doorbell with a warm smile asks to come in, whispers something into your ear and after a while you tear your own house down. Such has been the case with filmmaking after the turn of the century. Much like our politics weve fallen into an extreme polarization, where everything is broken up into binary compartments. Youre either Democrat or youre republican and you can have no respect for thee other, youre either a big loud blockbuster, or a small quiet independent film. This is the problem with Christopher Nolan, it shouldnt be, we should love him for what hes accomplished, his movies should hold no less than 85 % each on the aggregate review sites. Yet since announcing his coming with a fog horn in the puzzle within a puzzle movie Memento. No Nolan movie since has ever quite gelled with the audience or the critics. I compare him a lot to the Obama presidency, they both seek to give the general public what they ask for, and have both been met with mostly complaints and cynical outrage. During the Obama presidency we have seen Gas prices drop, unemployment drop, the restabilization of the car industry, Healthcare, and equal marriage rights, yet he has the lowest approval rating of any recent president. Nolan has bridged the rather large gap between the loud, ambitious , epic, blockbuster culture, and the quiet, smaller, slice of life films associated with indie filmmaking and Oscar bait. And for being the first of this current generation and really the only for sometime, (although Brad bird, and JJ Abrams might have something to say about that now) to even try he has done a damn good job of it. Yet his films are largely ignored come Oscar season. Heres where mediocrity has snuck in mucking things up. Because as I look on the aggregate review site Rotten Tomatoes, a great sprawling epic with an interesting look at what love can drive people to do, whether its deceive for the sake of humanity, or gamble for the sake of romance, or endure for the sake of family. Wrapped in a story about space and time travel, that features jaw dropping special effects holds a so so 73%. While a formulaic, straightforward, if not robust and fun film about the A-Team of comicdom Guardians of the Galaxy holds a 90%. When the fact of the matter is that Guardians of the Galaxy was merely better than it was supposed to be, Interstellar was just better. Ive heard the word puzzle used a lot to describe Nolans filmmaking, but if thats all your grabbing out of a Nolan picture, then as one of the characters in prestige ( My personal favorite) asked Are you watching?. Nolan follows the Italian filmmakers of the early 40s by not making a movie from which he does not have a ideology or stance, and like a rorschach you may have found your answer but you are mistaken if you think it is the answer. Take for example the fact that Nolans films never quite feature a pure villain. Sure they re doing bad things but they always have complex and compelling reasons for doing them, and so usually the true villains are ideologies, sometimes the same ones that govern the heroes in his films. Its complex amd less simplistic than the evil because hes blue, paint by numbers storytelling in GoG, and even last years spectacularly executed but thinly told Gravity with its palatable story, and lack of any original direction in which it unfolds. Consider how well these movies did both critically and monetarily and considering that both The clever Edge of Tomorrow, as well as Interstellar are either ignored at the box office, or picked at by critics.. to use a quote from another film (though not a good one..Meet the Fockers) Ive never seen such a celebration of mediocrity.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 19:47:40 +0000
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