JFK

JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991) 

 

"To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards of men."

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

 

At the time of this film's release, Stone's movie-collage of Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories was more than controversial, it was inflammatory. Experts in "the field" criticized it for playing fast and loose with facts and some went so far as to call it dangerous in its implications. There was so much flummery going on, some of which contradicted other speculations of the film, that it was considered a new form of propaganda, where new possibilities popped up before previous assertions were followed up on, that one was simply overwhelmed with the slew of speculations so that, finally, nothing was ever concluded. There were no answers, merely a mountain of questions, all of them vague and unsubstantiated. Stone was merely throwing stuff up at the screen and seeing if anything stuck.

Stone answered these charges by saying that he was making a new kind of film, and that he was trying to build a new narrative for the Kennedy assassination, not provide a definitive answer, but to ask questions, merely. The evidence of film bears it out—at least at first glance—as it's so filled with theories and goes down so many rabbit-holes, unchecked and unverified (Stone has stated he was using the films Rashomon and Z as his models). But, one only has to see how Stone starts the movie to know where he thinks the center of the conspiracy lies. After that quote by author and spiritualist Ella Wheeler Wilcox, he introduces Kennedy's predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower's final address as President, in which he warns of "the military-industrial complex". Like so many openings of so many movies, it is the director's thesis statement, providing that one bit of detail before launching into a history of Kennedy's recent history (narrated by Martin Sheen, who has played both John and Robert Kennedy in the past).

"I'm ashamed to be an American today."

The film proper begins the day of Kennedy's assassination as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner, who had, in 1998's Bull Durham, delivered a speech in which his character states "I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.") sees the assassination coverage on television initially in his office, then watches mournfully from a nearby bar where the local booze-hounds are free to weep in their beers or grunt their approval of the President's death. At the same point he cuts away to an argument between two men in the bar, New Orleans private detective Guy Bannister (Edward Asner) and an operative Jack Wheeler (Jack Lemmon),* which leads to a fight in Bannister's office when Martin brings up past suspicious activity. Meanwhile, Garrison starts looking into local links to the assassination and brings in pilot David Ferrie (Joe Pesci), who might have had links with Oswald. And despite Ferrie being sketchy and giving conflicting stories, they let him go.

"It's all broken down, spread around, you read it and the point gets lost."

It is only after the Warren Commission Report on the assassination is released that Garrison picks up the threads of the case again. A chance airplane encounter with a Senator (Walter Matthau), whose skepticism —"That dog don't hunt!"—about the report sparks Garrison to again call in Ferrie, but also Martin, who had seen Lee Harvey Oswald in Bannister's office and follow up leads not explored after the initial inquiry was dropped. One name keeps popping up—"Clay Bertrand" but nobody knows who that is. Turns out that "Bertrand" is an alias of Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones), well known in New Orleans business circles as a wealthy benefactor and who had connections with Ferrie and thus Oswald. Garrison and his team have Shaw picked up for arrest despite their inquiries producing only denials.

 

"Oh, you are so naive"

 

One aspect of the film that is both a high achievement and problematic is the way that it mixes archive footage with deftly re-created new footage in such a way that it is nearly impossible to determine one from the other. Stone and his cinematographer, the wizardly Robert Richardson, mix and match formats, color and black-and-white, 35mm and 16mm, and all sorts of film stocks to create and re-create source footage and the results are nearly indistinguishable, especially the way they are cross-cut between each other. It lends the air of verisimilitude—and certainly adds a dynamic tension between the transitions—but one is never sure if one should believe what one is seeing. Is that press footage from the day of the shooting or is Stone just fabricating something he wants you to see?

It's troubling. There's a fine line between making it look right and obfuscation and given that film, by its very nature, is manipulative—even with documentaries—the level of distrust this attention to detail evokes is extremely high. What are we to believe? The answer is whatever the director wants you to believe. And given Richardson's deserving Oscar-winning work on this film to match the look, the grain and the confusion of archive footage, some of which might even be familiar, distinguishing the true from forgery is almost impossible. And audiences become susceptible.

One should always be aware that it's a fictional film of real-life events. And rather than speaking truth, it can only come up with conjecture.

 

"And the truth is on your side, bubba."

 

Stone makes his own case on what happened in a middle sequence where Garrison goes to Washington D.C. to meet an informant, a former military official who only identifies himself as "X" (Donald Sutherland, who's brilliant in a role of pure exposition). That Garrison would fly to D.C. to meet an anonymous source strains credulity (he surely must know his name before agreeing to meet, but then, the reality is Garrison never met this character, communicating with him in un-cinematic exchanges of letters).

It is 'X''s contention that Kennedy was making feasibility studies for withdrawing troops from Vietnam—"X" was doing the inquiries—and that this rattled the cages of the Pentagon and the CIA. "X" is unexpectedly assigned to...Antarctica...and only learns of the assassination the next day when he reads a New Zealand newspaper that has a full run-down on Oswald as the assassin when he hadn't even been charged yet. To "X" this smacks of "black ops" work (which he also used to do). Oh, and did I mention that "X" was also part of Kennedy's security detail? "X" seems to have got around.

Anyway, by the end of his exposition, "X" has a conspiracy that could involve the Pentagon, "the military-industrial complex", FBI, CIA, Cuban exiles, the Mafia, the Secret Service and Lyndon B. Johnson—he was in the fired-upon motorcade, after all—and all of them had grudges against Kennedy, but mostly, they didn't want to cease operations in Vietnam which was making a lot of people a lot of money. This is the same Vietnam War that Oliver Stone fought in from 1967 to 1968 with the 25th Infantry, which was a traumatic experience for him, and that he has made the subject of three of his films.

"X" refuses to come forward with this information and flat-out refuses to be a witness for Garrison's prosecution, but "X" tells him that his best chance is that he's the only guy conducting a trial involving the Kennedy assassination. "Your only chance," he says "is to come up with a case. Something. Anything. Make arrests. Stir the shit-storm. Hope to start a chain reaction of people coming forward. Then the government will crack." And, with those words of encouragement, he walks away, leaving Garrison hanging. Stone cuts to the Eternal Flame at Kennedy's grave. When Stone gets in trouble, he goes for sentimentality.

The film's last hour is that most deadly of momentum killers, a trial, with Exhibit A being a long speech by one character...in this case Garrison.* That speech wouldn't stand in a court of law and it isn't made clear if it's a closing argument (that barely mentions the defendant Clay Shaw) or a part of Garrison's evidentiary overview (it starts with objections from the defense and then they are never heard from again), but Stone is dramatically stretching truth...and credulity...to make his point. And it goes on forever, like the stultifying final speech in court in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. It's only Stone's direction, Richardson's chameleon cinematography and Joe Hutshing and Pietro Scalia's quick-silver editing that keeps it interesting as film. And almost impossible to make counter-arguments against the assertions, they come so fast and furiously.

Stone's film ends with "what's past is prologue." Okay, so let's look at the past. All previous American political assassinations, successful or otherwise, before and after Kennedy's own, have been due to "lone gun-men" (or women). The most suspicious shooting is that of Martin Luther King, Jr.  And most damning of all, recent events have seen Presidents and Vice-Presidents questioning or ignoring, even humiliating their own intelligence or military agencies...but manage to remain very much alive. Kennedy was less of a threat...he merely wanted to wind down a war...as has been done recently...and Stone would have you think he was killed for it.

Yet, History doesn't bear that out. In fact, though they may rebel (or at least write a book), they don't assassinate. "That dog don't hunt."

Remember, "what's past is prologue."

But, the film did have an impact. 99% of the documents that were sealed after the assassination have been brought to light, particularly to the issues raised in the movie (The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 was passed in 1992, the year after the movie's release). Although the stated goal of the act was to release all documents by October 2017, some still have not been released. Trump went back on a promise to release them pushing it back to when he was out of office, then Biden delayed them (COVID...for some reason) then released some in 2022 and 2023.** We're at 99% except for those that would cause "identifiable harm... to the military, defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations... of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure."

Same old excuse. "It'll keep us from doing our jobs" they say, even if those jobs have dramatically changed in 60 years. But, if JFK is worth anything, it is for its shaming of our government agencies' lack of transparency to commit them to act in that 1992 law. Six decades is two generations of secrets. Too many people and too many prominent people have expressed their doubts to not have as many answers as possible to wash away as many questions as possible.

Not that that will make a difference. We've reached the Age of Un-reason where nobody believes their own eyes anymore. If everything was released, unredacted and transparent, it is doubtful that the truth would be accepted...especially by those who make their livings as professional doubters and skeptics.

The true conspiracy has always been theirs. As in the mantra of All the President's Men, one merely has to "follow the money."

"It's up to you."

 

* The film is awash with cameo's and "guest-stars" in what Stone intended to be like the roster of The Longest Day, but it feels more like the many odd cameos in The Greatest Story Ever Told, that seem ill-though-out and are actually distracting and pull you right out of the movie. John Candy? 

** This is just part of Garrison's summation from the film:

The Warren Commission thought they had an open-and-shut case. Three bullets, one assassin. But two unpredictable things happened that day that made it virtually impossible. One, the eight-millimeter home movie taken by Abraham Zapruder while standing by the grassy knoll. Two, the third wounded man, James Tague, who was knicked by a fragment, standing near the triple underpass. The time frame, five point six seconds, determined by the Zapruder film, left no possibility of a fourth shot. So the shot or fragment that left a superficial wound on Tague's cheek had to come from the three shots fired from the sixth floor depository. That leaves just two bullets. And we know one of them was the fatal head shot that killed Kennedy. So now a single bullet remains. A single bullet now has to account for the remaining seven wounds in Kennedy and Connelly. But rather than admit to a conspiracy or investigate further, the Warren Commission chose to endorse the theory put forth by an ambitious junior counselor, Arlen Spector, one of the grossest lies ever forced on the American people. We've come to know it as the "Magic Bullet Theory." This single-bullet explanation is the foundation of the Warren Commission's claim of a lone assassin. Once you conclude the magic bullet could not create all seven of those wounds, you'd have to conclude that there was a fourth shot and a second rifle. And if there was a second rifleman, then by definition, there had to be a conspiracy.

*** Whether Trump will release any more documents in his next term one can only speculate. I don't believe a word the man says so even if he says he will, I'd be looking at updates on the website: https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk

Disclosure (1994)

Saturday is "Take Out the Trash" Day.

Disclosure (Barry Levinson, 1994) Handsome, but su-leeeeeeazy mounting of the Michael Crichton story about sexual politics in the work-place. With Michael Douglas heading the cast, the film could be confused for Fatal Attraction II, and one wonders just how far the makers were going for that, what with Douglas top-lining ...Attraction and Basic Instinct and Demi Moore, late of Indecent Proposal. Unfortunately, where those films whetted the national apetite for dangerous sex-capades, Crichton's cold-shower-of-an-idea seems tame.

At a cutting-edge Seattle software firm* experimenting in virtual reality, Tom Sanders (Douglas) thinks he's getting a promotion from his slick-as-shit boss (Donald Sutherland). He gets passed-over for Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore, all power-suit, push-up bra and stiletto heels), who's robotically quick with company-approved schpiel, with just a bit of predator to her. She's also an ex-girlfriend of the Douglas character.

Wuh-oh! Better watch out, Mike!

But because it's a two-hour movie, when Meredith invites him for an after-hours conference with some wine and her tongue in his ear, he goes--rather than saying, oh, I don't know--they've got e-mail at this high-tech Seattle firm?--"Hey, let me draw up a complete scenario of where we've been for that last three months with documentations and e-mail that to you, and then we can tackle it fresh in the morning." No, he doesn't do that, he's a little slow. Meredith, though, is pretty darn quick. When she starts unzipping his pants, what does he do? Stop her? Nooooo...When the simulated sex act begins? Noooooo. (I should mention that, at this point, Douglas does the patented Sharon Stone "pleasure" move from Basic Instinct--cock your head back so your neck is bent double and spasmodically open and close your mouth in a guppy fashion).

Finally, after the two are in a quasi-missionary position, the panting Douglas grows a conscience and decides to leave the office, after which Meredith follows him screaming "Get back and finish what you started, or you're dead, do you hear me?!" Since the office is in Pioneer Square, just about every bar-patron and driver on the Alaska Way Viaduct could hear her. As does the cleaning lady.

Anybody think this is a bit dumb?

It is. It gets dumber, when the Douglas character sues for sexual harassment, and she sues back. Crichton is making a point about sexual politics in a predatory environment in the work-place, but the message gets a bit dulled, and then the film-makers make a last-minute bid for political correctness that works as well as it did in The Bonfire of the Vanities, that is, not at all. Crichton was a hell of a writer, but his female characters were usually lacking personality (not that his male characters were ever fully developed), but were particularly and inexplicably fickle in their thinking. He was hardly a person to be objective about the battle of the sexes.** 

Even the high-tech elements are a little suspect, with a virtual environment that evidently sucks so much CPU that it slows down the "Delete" process long enough to make it a race to amp up the drama.Disclosure is a by-the-numbers package deal combining the movie-making cachet of Crichton, Douglas and Moore, in the hope it would translate to big bucks at the box-office. In that way, it resembles nothing so much as the fly-by-night computer companies that took a collective dive when the hi-tech bubble burst. Both had similar problems.

No one was buying.

* One of those very rare films set in Seattle that is actually filmed in Seattle rather than Vancouver, BC. Even Battle in Seattle about the WTO riots was filmed in Canada. Okay, they did come to town for a week-end to shoot pick-ups. 

** His non-fiction book, "Travels" has a couple of episodes where I got the impression that the author was not only a chauvinist, but an unapologetic one.

Ad Astra

I should caution before you go any further that this review is full of spoilers.

To the Stars, Alice! (Zoom! Pow!)
or
In Space, No One Should Hear You Voice-Over
or
Ameliorating With Extreme Prejudice

Science Fiction is a fascinating genre. At its best, it is mind-expanding, forcing you to ponder the imponderable and think the unthinkable...to look at things in new ways and never see them again as you once did, or even think about why things are, and how they managed to get there in the first place...and why not another.

That's "science fiction," the concept. It is rarely science fiction, the reality. As one of it's practitioners, Theodore Sturgeon, once opined "90% of science fiction is crap...but then, 90% of everything is crap." 

With the exception of science fiction movies, where the percentage is upwards of 95%.* And if you think I'm being too harsh, then consider one of the hallmarks of science fiction movies is The Planet of the Apes. Frankly, really good science fiction is above the heads of casual movie-goers—you throw two or three advanced concepts out of their comfort zone and it'll turn into a giggle-fest. In movies, a "successful" science fiction movie is, by and large, another reliable story or concept that is set in the future or in space. The familiar off-sets the strange and, as a bonus, keeps the familiar hidden in plain sight.

So, James Gray is a good director. His last movie, an adaptation of the daunting book The Lost City of Z was very good and too little seen. It was backed by Brad Pitt's Plan B company (and, at one point, Pitt was going to star). Whatever returns the movie made, Pitt is one of the folks behind Gray's new film Ad Astra—Latin for "To the Stars"—about an Earth in "the near future," at which time four things seem to be occurring: 1) Earth has expanded colonizing other planets; 2) we commercialize those colonies to the hilt—there's a Pioneer Hotel and Casino on the Moon, judging by the "Vegas Vic" neon sign**; 3) humans are spending an inordinate amount of time searching for intelligent life...with at least two major projects—an Earth-based antenna array that extends from the Earth's surface into space and a deep-space manned mission called the Lima Project sent to do exactly the same thing on the outer rim of the solar system***; and 4) the Earth is being buffeted by something called "The Surge" which acts like a high altitude nuclear weapon disrupting and shutting down power grids across the Earth...and the Moon.

It's that last one that gets the narrative ball rolling—Pitt plays astronaut Major Roy McBride, considered top-notch in his field because he's emotionally stable (despite being something of an space-"orphan"—more on that in a moment) who stays cool under any circumstance proven by the fact that his heart-rate has never risen above 80 BPM—not even when, during one of these "surge" events, he's knocked off the Earth-based antenna seeking extraterrestrial signals from space. He survives the high-altitude fall despite having his parachute slightly damaged on the way down and he's called on by U.S. Space Command (SpaceCom) to undertake a top secret mission.

It seems those "surge" blasts have been tracked originating from the planet Neptune. That particular planet is where The Lima Project, commanded by McBride's father, H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), was sent to search for E.T. signals at the outer reaches of the solar system. His father is considered dead, as nothing has been heard from the Lima probe for sixteen years, but, those surge blasts are coming from Neptune...and there's some techno-babble about it having to do with anti-matter, and the power source for Lima did have an element of anti-matter to it. They put "2" and "-2" together and came up with a Neptune-sized "0". McBride is asked to go to Mars, which has an underground facility not affected by the "surge" to relay a message to the Lima Project—and, hopefully, his father—to find out what the heck Dad is doing out there. If he truly is "Out There."

But, first, they have to go to the Moon. Commercial flights are available (on Virgin) and McBride is joined by an old colleague of his father's, Col. Pruitt (Donald Sutherland, sure, because he and Jones were in Space Cowboys together), who has been brought out of retirement to keep an eye on McBride and has his own ideas about what happened "out there." Seems the older McBride was upset that Pruitt quit SpaceCom, calling him "a traitor," and, given his father's nature, "a voyage of exploration can be used for escape. We think your father is hiding."

The trip to the Moon is uneventful, if still based on the rather wasteful first stage/second stage way of going into space now. The lunar colony is now a tourist destination, which Roy says—in his ever-present narration****—is "covered with drink stands and T-shirt vendors—just a recreation of what they were running away from on Earth—if my Dad saw this, he'd tear it all down." Well, he just might be doing that, sonny-boy. Better head for the next leg of the journey—from Moon to Mars. Trouble is, there's a little territoriality going on, Moon-side. Seems mining interests (maybe led by Sam Rockwell—or Rockwells) are in dispute, and there have been incidences of violence and theft by pirates.

Pirates? On the Moon? Arrrr, I HATE those!

As goofy and entertaining as a rove-by shooting on the Moon is, it's just there to provide "an incident bump" so that something is happening besides watching ships move in a straight line and Pitt's constant navel-gazing (no, ladies, not literally). It is not necessary to the plot. It is not necessary at all. All it does is get rid of Pruitt's character and gives McBride an opportunity to know something that Pruitt is hiding about the mission, something that would have been revealed later, anyway. Grant the sequence this, though: it's staged like one of John Ford's "we've got company" Indian attacks (on the Moon!) and it does a marvelous job of recreating the hummocky lunar landscapes familiar from the Moon landings. If only they could fake it that well in the 1960's!

So, McBride gets to go on his trip to Mars to deliver the message to his father, and it's not a commercial flight, it's more like a trucker line—McBride refers to the astronauts as "long-haulers." They basically launch from the Moon base and then point themselves at the spot where Mars is going to be when they get there in 19 days. Fast trip. But, too long for a movie unless something happens along the way. The movie needs another "bump." So, they get a "May-Day" signal from a "bio-medical" facility called Vesta IX and decide to investigate. McBride puts up a protest that he is on a top-secret mission and the pilot cannot risk screwing it up. The pilot, says, sure, but this is a "May-Day" and he has to investigate, especially since he's not getting any return hails. McBride thinks it's stupid, but ultimately agrees, even volunteering to join the pilot when he notices the co-pilot is a bit reluctant to go (which brings up the "Captain Kirk" rule—the commander should stay on the ship and let the "red-shirts" handle it, but, no, not on this ship). 

There, then begins the "Alien" episode, where McBride and the pilot split off on the Vesta, looking for the crew...bad idea, but, we're starting to get used to bad ideas on this trip...and this movie. I would like to be spoiler-free in this review, but I don't think Ad Astra is worth seeing, and, also, I can't resist using the phrase "Crazy-Killer-Baboons-From-Space." Yes. They go there. It was about this time I gave up on the movie (but stuck it out until the end).

But, one other thing about the sequence disturbed me—it's impossible. The transport is going in a straight-line (with gravity variants) to Mars (or where it will be in 19 days) and getting there pretty damn fast. Unless the Vesta facility is on the same trajectory going at the same speed, the pilot wouldn't be able to just "change course" like on "Star Trek" and sidle on over to the other ship—they don't have brakes in space, they would have to stop their momentum (which is a lot to ask) in order to rendezvous, and then, once they're done, restart the engines to regain that same speed to continue on to "where-Mars-will-be-in-19-days-plus-the-amount-of-time-wasted-on-the-'May-day' signal." This is "Star Wars"-science, meaning it's not science at all.

They make it to Mars, not easily—another "Surge" happens just as they're trying to land and McBride is welcomed to the underground Mars-base by its manager Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga), who escorts him to his destination, but she is dismissed by SpaceCom authorities as "not authorized at this level." He is escorted into a sound-proofed booth, handed a script and reads it—if you've forgotten because of the rove-by shootings and killer space baboons, that is that mission to read a message to his father, who might be alive near Neptune. McBride's script is "just the facts, ma'am" formal, and no reply is received after Roy reads it. Neptune does not respond.

But, Roy is freaking out. He spends a lot of time in "comfort-rooms" that project Earth-scenes on the walls and voice-overing about his father and him and their lack of relationship and how they're more alike than he might know and wonders what the long-form Lima Project might have done to "my Dad. Did it break him? Or was he already broken?" At that point, the H. Clifford McBride character starts to take on the mythos of Marlon Brando's Col. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Old messages have messianic overtones and a devotion to the search for E.T.'s that slightly creep one out. 

Next time, Roy goes in the booth to broadcast a signal, he goes off-script, appealing to his father directly, using personal details and ending with "Your loving son, Roy." He waits, and when there is more activity in the control room, he understand what it means "You heard from him, didn't you?" When he is not given an official reply to his questions, he starts to get angry. Now, it's personal and that's just what SpaceCom doesn't want. "Thank you, Major. For your service, we will return you to Earth. Your connection makes you unsuitable for the Mission."

Now, they tell him.

Roy's security clearance is revoked, and all he can do is go to a comfort room and stare at the fish. Then, Lantos makes a visit and asks "They never told you what happened to him out there, did they?" Well, no, they didn't, and it's surprising that she knows as she'd previously been told she was "not cleared at this level." Lantos reveals to McBride that her parents were also part of Lima and that his father killed everybody else on the project to quell an apparent mutiny—something Pruitt was aware of. She shows him a classified tape of the older McBride reporting the incident to Earth: "I'm disclosing a tragedy...I have killed the innocent and the guilty."

Then, she drops a bomb on him. The ship he came in on is being re-purposed with nuclear weapons to go out to Neptune and destroy Lima. All Roy can think about is that he has to get back on that ship and get to Neptune.

I've dropped so many spoilers, I'm not compounding any damage to say that he does. But, how he does it is eye-rollingly stupid, and once he gets there, things go downhill just as the ship is launching, because apparently there are no such things as G-forces during a launch. What then happens is a contrivance that just ensures that Roy is the only one to make the long, lonely trek to confront his Father and...as the SpaceCom boys say "ameliorate the situation."

And with that, the film plays out more for the sake of convenience than any sort of Big Theme about the nature of man or his place in the Universe, other than the notion that to be obsessed with life off the Earth and ignore it at home is crazy and crazy-making. What good is proving we're not alone in the Universe, when we're isolating ourselves on Earth?

Well, the quest for knowledge, for one thing. If human beings don't have all the answers, it would be nice to get a second opinion. But, the movie is too involved with self-involvement to ponder that. But, one should go into space with more goals than merely to solve "Daddy Issues."

So, (the movie says) astronauts are cold and distant...because their destinations are. And the farther we go, the more distant, physically and emotionally, they're going to become. Not a big revelation or a revolutionary statement. That's why there are no space-romance movies unless they throw out the physics book, and when they don't, you get creepy things like...Passengers (shudder). All you had to do was take a look at astronaut divorce statistics: all that training, all that time away from families...and that's for trips that took up to a week. With the ISIS and extended-stay missions, the toll on families must be enormous. The toll on families must be irrevocable.

But, James Gray obviously didn't know that. I've known it since Frank Poole's birthday party...and you know something? David Bowie and Elton John, who are not film-makers or involved in space-programs, knew it, too, some 40+ years ago. And it should be obvious—explorers do not make good partners...because they will not value others above their personal goals. They are selfish, self-involved, and frequently obsessed. They have a singular vision, and "singular" doesn't involve sharing. Gray's The Lost City of Z had that as a sub-text. Putting the story in space doesn't change the point. We're merely repeating ourselves somewhere else.

And that's not science fiction, not if we're trying to expand things, or think new thoughts. It's not much of anything, really.

Ad Astra is a waste of time...and space.

* No, I haven't forgotten about 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick's "proverbial GOOD science fiction movie" ("You new here?"). In fact, I've written about it so often, that I avoid mentioning it whenever I can. It's part of the 10% that isn't crap, and actually achieves what I proposed as the mission of science fiction—"to go (boldly) where no mind has gone before."

** Someone should tell the director or art director or CGI-ist's that the Pioneer Club shut down in 1995 "in the near past" and became a souvenir shop. The sign remains in Vegas  for nostalgic reasons. And because...Vegas.

*** Neil deGrasse Tyson will have a field day with this one: why off of God's green Earth would you send a manned probe to search for messages from outer space to Neptune when those messages will arrive at Earth 4 hours and 2 minutes later? What's the hurry? If somebody wants to come up with some woo-woo explanation like "because of the Van Allen belts" I would reply...then set 'em up away from them on the Moon, dummy! Why go to Neptune...except to gin up false drama?

**** This continuous narration is annoying. Maybe it was a nod to Willard's narration in Apocalypse Now (which the movie resembles—I kept thinking over some of the montages "Space transit. Shi-iit. I'm still in Space transit"), but it's closer to the "hit-you-over-the- head" narration of the theater version of Blade Runner. It would have been a far gutsier—albeit riskier—move to just eliminate it, even if it left some of the audience in the lunar dust. Pitt's performance is internalized and well-done and one can tell that his McBride is dealing with a lack of engagement to counter-act his separation anxiety issues without having to tell us.. I'm not sure that the narration provides anything that Gray doesn't already provide visually and it feels like the voice-over was put in at the studio's insistence...due to cold corporate feet. I'm thinking there'll be a non-narration director's cut "in the near future."

Pride and Prejudice (2005)

Pride and Prejudice (Joe Wright, 2005) One must ask oneself can there be anything more done with "Pride and Prejudice"—the much-adapted jewel in the Jane Austen tiara? It turns out that, yes, verily, there can. Director Joe Wright, in his first full length motion picture (after some shorts and mini-series work), takes some of the stuffing out of the classic novel (aided and abetted by screenwriter Deborah Moggach with some additional material stuffed into it by Sense and Sensibilty scribe Emma Thompson) and makes it move in its own frenetic dance for the first 3/4 of it. The many dances and balls are choreographed and photographed to maximum effect, in ways that, at times, are sublimely comic—the way I prefer Austen to be treated—as well as the ways in which the 19th Century mating rituals and business marriages are carried out amongst classes and stations seem to intersect naturally with Wright's searching, shifting camera moves during the film's country dance sequences.

Then, in moments that Austen would call "high dudgeon"—and what I would call "money-shots"—Wright's camera stops and Nature takes over, culminating in two eerie scenes: one, a confrontation between Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley) and her object of obsession Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen) staged in an unyielding Greco-Roman pogoda during a thunderstorm; and later during a bizarre shot where Elizabeth, locked in emotional and physical paralysis, spends an uncertain day in one spot as the sun and Nature move around her, a fascinating way to pull off her receiving Darcy's letter of regret without really receiving him.

Sometimes, Wright goes a bit too far blowing the dust off this classic—a spinning camera from Elizabeth's point of view on a swing seamlessly, and a little nauseatingly, shows the passing of time. And he can't resist a "money shot," a gorgeous, overly dramatic shot of Elizabeth on cliff-top at Stanage Edge, ensuring that her new perspective on things is in Panavision. 

But he's also aided immeasurably by extremely naturalistic performances (including those of Brenda Blethyn and Donald Sutherland as the Bennett parents) from an ensemble encouraged to stumble over each other's words to take the starch out of the formality, including outstanding turns from soon-to-be stars Rosamund Pike and Carey Mulligan, a performance by Dame Judi Dench in full "battleaxe" mode, and another of those extremely mercurial performances by Keira Knightley, whose Elizabeth Bennett goes from apple-cheeked gushing teenager to stormy-eyed character assassin in hardly a blink.

Of course, any "Pride and Prejudice" stands or falls on the chemistry between its Elizabeth and its Mr. Darcy, who is here played by Matthew Macfadyen, in what is always the toughest role—he has to play a standoffish prig but still be attractive enough to pull off the transition to ardent suitor, especially an accepted ardent suitor. And, here, Knightley's fierceness plays to the advantage of that relationship. You can believe that she's smitten by the man as much as she's infuriated by him, a fine example of the maxim (used by me a LOT) that Love and Hate are not opposites, but merely two sides of the same coin; the true opposite of love is indifference. Darcy may feign indifference, but it is pretense, given his position and family objections.

Maybe it should have been titled "Pride, Prejudice, and Pretense." That certainly works better than "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies."