Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story

Participant to Observer

or

"And Then She Said the Words That Saved My Life: 'You're Still You and I Love You.'"
 

I assume everybody knows the story: Christopher Reeve, Broadway actor, was picked to play "Superman" in the 1978 movie of the same name—bulked up strenuously to do it—and essayed the role through four films, while also choosing to be in other projects that were farther afield to prevent type-casting. Then, a horse-riding accident left him paralyzed from the neck down—"It's what happens when the trap-door opens and the noose tightens"—unable to breathe without assistance. The doctors gave him a 50/50 chance to live through the night. His older son says that the doctors "re-attached his head to his body."

 

And then he got to work. 

 

Reeve became the best-known advocate for spinal chord injuries and despite his touch-and-go condition, he and his wife Dana, would go anywhere, meet anyone who could write a check, provide a medical path, raise awareness. He also managed to act...and direct projects...totally confined to a wheel-chair, unable to support his neck, breathing with a respirator. 10 short months after his accident, he appeared on-stage in a wheelchair at the Oscar ceremony...and cracked jokes.

 

And the prevailing wisdom became "If he wasn't Superman before, he sure is now." 

His story, with the full cooperation of the Reeve children, his former partner Gae Exton, DC Studios, Warner Brother studios, and anyone who had footage of the man has been released as a "Fathom Event"—one of those special piped-in presentations to a theater environment—and called Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story. It makes use of a lot of home-movie footage, contemporary interviews with friends and family, doctors, experts, and archival footage, an amazing curating job executed by directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui.

Reeves' tragic accident—which, when you see it, looks so flukish—raised awareness of the quadriplegic community; if you didn't know someone who was completely paralyzed, suddenly you did. Forget that Reeve was long-past the Superman role and was in lower profile projects and TV movies that were usually seen (mostly) by the devoted, but suddenly, he was uppermost in peoples' awareness.

Bonhôte and Ettedqui take you through the whole life-story, starting on New Year's Eve 1985 with a family celebration and a post-accident Reeve saying "It seemed like my life came together. And then, in an instant, everything changed."* You see home movies of him and his kids charging though sportsy activities with his kids, yelling at them "Carpe Diem!", showing him active, but more than active, downright aggressive. He was a flyer, skier, skater, yachtsman, and as far as horses..."I've always been allergic to horses"...but, loaded up on anti-histamines he learned to ride for a film and fell in love with it. He liked aggressive sports, but insisted he was careful because "I didn't want to see a headline like 'Superman Hit By a Bus.'"

 

That produces a grisly laugh. But, it shows the honesty with which the the piece is presented. Details are presented about his condition are presented to hammer home the precariousness with which he lived through the ordeal, the things left out of the papers, the raw emotions of those going through it are not held in check, and if one comes away unmoved by the honorableness of the participants, then a trip to the ER is suggested to check for a pulse.

A couple of persistent thoughts:

 

— the devotion of Robin Williams. Williams and Reeve were fellow acting students and roommates while attending Julliard and remained steadfast friends. After the accident, if there was anything the Reeves needed, Williams would provide it. On every anniversary of the accident, Williams would host a grand party at the Reeves' place to keep the actor from dwelling on the accident.

—those kids: Reeve had two children with his partner Gae Exton, Matthew and Alexandra, and one child with wife Dana, Will. Their interviews are straight-forward, honest, passionate, and you can't not admire them, individually and together, and you have to wonder at what kind of parents Reeve and both women must have been to produce such amazing people.

 

—the steeliness of Christopher Reeve: that's not some pun. The whole movie is watching Reeve push and push and push himself to improve, whether it's weight-training for Superman or grinding through re-hab. The movie explains his up-bringing—parents divorced when he was 3, and neither parent was what one would call nurturing, but obsessively judgemental. They inscribed in his DNA a restless dissatisfaction with the status quo in order, if not to please them, the potential to please them, by pushing himself. Some of that probably saved his life initially after the accident, but it sure must not have been easy.

 

It's a wonderful tribute, as painful as it sometimes is to watch. The triumphs, the tragedies, the pain. No doubt it will be streaming on some service in the near-future.

* While paralyzed, among all the other things he did, Reeve managed to dictate and get published a couple of books. And he did the audio-books for them (which is where a lot of the narration comes from). Now, think of that: He was breathing through a tube and still managed to record the narration for his two books. I've seen perfectly healthy authors for whom that was a trial. But, Reeve....? Probably gave it his all.

Good Night, and Good Luck.

Good Night, and Good Luck. (George Clooney, 2005) There had been talk about an "Edward R. Murrow" movie for a very long time, and there'd been quite a few actors who fancied the role—Roy Scheider and Daniel J. Travanti being two that I know of—but nothing had ever been done beyond the script stage. That was the issue; where would you start? The man who had been such a cornerstone of journalism through its transitions from print to radio to television, and had a personal hand in how those mediums affected the form and presentation, had a multi-storied career. Like Lincoln, where would you start and where would you end? What was the section that you would concentrate on that would make the boldest, most informative statement about the man, his principles, and how he fought for them? His work as a radio broadcaster in London during World War II? His ballsy documentaries running in primetime on CBS during the 1950's? But, the seminal moment—his greatest moment and the one that started the end of his career—was when he took on Joe McCarthy.

Clooney (who also co-wrote with producing partner Grant Heslov) begins his film with another "Murrow Moment"—October 25, 1958, to be exact—when he took his broadcast journalist cronies in the RTNDA* to task for letting their values slip in a speech where he was to be given an "honorarium" three months after his last documentary for CBS News. Murrow started the speech with what would amount to him as a prep-joke: "This just might do nobody any good."

It didn't, other than to pass Murrow into Legend. It was seen by his former boss at CBS, William Paley (played by Frank Langella in the film) as a final stab in the back, after years of back-and-forth about the value of Murrow's "brand" of news at CBS. But, Murrow was never afraid to speak truth to power. He was never afraid to put out both sides of an issue. He was never afraid to share bad news. He might have hoped that his reputation would save him, and in a less corrupt industry that might have been true, but Murrow was too well-read, even if it was just the hand-writing on the wall.

At the time of the McCarthy broadcast, the prevailing attitude at CBS is fear, with a healthy dose of paranoia, as described by the film: reporters Joe Wershba (Robert Downey Jr.) and Shirley Lubowitz (Patricia Clarkson) are constantly looking over their shoulders—they haven't told anybody at CBS they're married as its against company policy; anchor Don Hollenbeck (Ray Wise) is facing crises both personal and professional—he's just been divorced and he's being smeared in the press as a "pinko"—not quite a "red", but just "red" enough; CBS News director Sig Mikelson (Jeff Daniels) is concerned about a piece Murrow (David Strathairn) and his producer Fred Friendly (Clooney) are doing about a U.S. Air Force officer recently discharged from the military for suspected members of the Communist Party in his family—at the officer's hearing, the charges were sealed, a clear violation of legal and constitutional rights. If the story is pursued, there is concern of a backlash from Senator Joe McCarthy, conducting a red witch-hunt, that could hurt CBS, and Alcoa, their sponsor with government contracts, might get hurt even more. And William Paley has to negotiate broadcast licenses with the government; controversy and criticism won't help at all.

Murrow's instinct is to follow the story, and one of his team recuses himself because his wife had been to Communist meetings before they'd even met, It only solidifies Murrow's commitment: "We're going to go with this story because the terror is right here in this room." When the Air Force story is aired, the officer is re-instated, but Wershba is button-holed in the halls of Congress and told by a source that his boss, Murrow, was once on the Communist payroll. Murrow and Friendly run another piece, hitting closer to home, over a McCarthy hearing of a Pentagon code room employee where the evidence is questionable at best. Murrow offers air-time to respond to the questions raised and McCarthy uses it to attack Murrow. Murrow offers a reply the next week, focusing on McCarthy's rebuttal, his tactics, and lack of clarification or defense of his actions, using McCarthy's own words against him, the result of which is a Senate investigation of the Senator himself. Although it all has the tacit approval of Paley, the result is that Murrow and Friendly's positions at CBS are undermined.

Clooney, in directing, makes a couple of critical choices: he shoots in black-and-white, so there is no disruption between the archive footage and the drama going on; he shoots in documentary style to lend the conversations a fast pace and a seeming verisimilitude; and he uses the real footage of McCarthy, so as not to betray any prejudices through casting or directing choices. McCarthy is shown, warts and all, with his failings intact to be judged. He also punctuates the film, approximately every 23 minutes with a jazz song (performed by Diane Reeves) to serve as a "greek chorus." The songs—ironically or suggestively titled—are "TV is the Thing This Year," "You're Driving Me Crazy," "I've Got My Eyes On You," "One for my Baby," "How High the Moon," and (most pithily) "Who's Minding the Store?"

The casting—apart from McCarthy, of course—couldn't be better: Downey, Daniels, Donovan, Clarkson, Langella...and Clooney...give particularly attention and devotion to the words in a screenplay where the words matter. And, in the plum role of Murrow, Strathairn gives a performance that, while not imitating the man, evokes him, the gravitas, and the emotional reserve where someone reacts with thought before feelings—because feelings can be seen on "I Love Lucy." More than anything, he evokes the image of Murrow as we want to remember him—the television knight with a typewriter, not a sword, and a shield of cigarette smoke, that makes him vulnerable, but no less chivalric or prepared to engage because of it.

 "It is my desire if not my duty to try to talk to you journeymen with some candor about what is happening in radio and television, and if what I say is responsible, I alone am responsible for the saying of it. Our history will be what we make of it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred year from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes of one week of all three networks, they will there find, recorded in black and white and in color, evidence of decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable, and complacent. We have a built in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information; our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses, and recognize that television, in the main, is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture, too late."

* The Radio-Television News Directors Association, although now it's The Radio-Television-Digital-News Association—RTDNA—and every year the give out the Edward R. Murrow Awards

The Lookout

Written at the time of the film's release...there's a bit of an up-date at the end...

The Lookout (Scott Frank, 2007) When one samples a lot of movies, one notices trends. Sometimes, they're small things like the string of copy-cat movies that ride the financial coat-tails of a box office smash. Maybe it's a theme, like "pregnant woman" movies, or "kids who have sex meet a grisly death."

Or superhero movies, be they light, grim, or attitude-of-the-month.

Maybe I don't get out much, but it seems odd that a lot of the teen "thrillers" I've seen lately begin with a spectacular and traumatic car-crash. Is that part of the teen-zeitgeist that the acquisition of the freedom that "wheels" represent also is uppermost on their minds as the most ironic of deaths--especially at a time when they're feeling most invulnerable. They can't imagine a "Dead Man's Curve" that could turn them into "teen angels" when they've seen themselves as an immortal "Leader of the Pack." There's something emblematically horrific about the symbol of your freedom turning against you.

And so, teen thrillers have the air of a driver's education blood-bath film about them. The Final Destination films had a spectacular highway smash-up. Disturbia opened with one that traumatized the hero.

So, too, does The Lookout, screenwriter Scott Frank's directorial debut. Frank's made a reputation for tough-guy neo-noirs along the lines of Get Shorty, Minority Report, Out of Sight,—he has inexplicably written the screenplay for Marley & Me—and The Lookout is in the same vein. Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) was a promising high-school athlete who, due to a stupid driving accident, has a variation of short-term memory loss and a crippling case of "Survivor's Guilt." For one, he has to make lists to keep him task-focused, and for the other he lives with his blind room-mate, Lewis (Jeff Daniels--fine, understated work). Cognitively, he's so "in the moment" that the only job he can reasonably function at is as clean-up crew at a local bank. That puts him under the watchful eye of a skanky team of heisters who blackmail Chris into being their entree into the facility.

One wishes that with a screenwriter of Frank's freshness that The Lookout would keep you guessing, but it does not—playing out as one might expect a movie with this particular character arc, would. This is no Memento that would turn the complications and moral implications of a brain condition like this on its medulla oblongata. Here, Scott treats it as a deficiency that needs to be overcome for the world to work right for the young Mr. Pratt. And there are enough complications that affect him personally that he is compelled to pull himself out of his funk, and get his head on straight. Sounds a bit rote--a bit Hollywood-convenient--when boiled down to those essentials. But there are compensations with the likes of actors like Daniels, and Bruce McGill, and Carla Gugino lending supporting roles.

One hopes for better things from the talented Frank, but considering he's in line to helm the next attempt to jump-start a "Planet of the Apes" franchise for 20th Century Fox, they might be empty hopes.

Note from 2021: Yeah, that :Planet of the Apes: thing didn't happen (well, it happened and happened well, but Frank wasn't credited on it. He turned to television platforms—when he wasn't writing for Marvel's "Wolverine" character—and had, it would seem a bit more freedom, and creative control. There, he made the TV series "Godless" and "The Queen's Gambit" which burned up Netflix for quite a time (and I'm watching it now...move by deliberate move).

Looper

Written at the time of the film's release.

Killing Time
or
Maybe You; Möbius

The trouble with time-travel movies is the really good ones (that is, the plausible ones—if such a thing exists) require a flow-chart to make any sense, and once you're doing that, you take a lot of the fun out of it. That would be the problem with going back in time—you'd be spending so much time making sure you didn't disturb anything and cleaning up after oneself that you'd hardly have any time reliving the past in the present if you hope to have any future. As one of the characters says "This time-travel crap, it fries your brain like an egg."

Fortunately, Rian Johnson (who made the rather precious Brick, and the entirely commendable The Brothers Bloom) has already done the muck-work for Looper, a tough-as-nails-time-travel noir set in the year 2044, where thirty years hence (2072) time-travel will be invented...and instantly made illegal. 

Well, if time-travel is outlawed, only outlaws will have time-travel, and so organized crime uses it—not to increase their fortunes, but to dispose of their garbage. "You can't dispose of a body in the future," narrates Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the long explanatory opening voice-over). "I dispose a body that technically doesn't exist." 

The future-hoods (dressed like Leone gunfighters) kidnap a "disposable," throw a hood over his head, hog-time him in a vest lined with silver bars, and toss him in the time machine, where he quickly appears in 2044, is just as quickly "whacked" and the silver mined as payment by the executioner, called a "looper"—local-time kids, who are given rich rewards, a steady cache of drugs, and rental of a woman of his choice. They live like sociopathic kings in a Karl Rove dream-scape, where the meek don't inherit nuthin'—the middle class are roaming the streets pushing shopping carts, while the killers drive jet-cycles.

Overseeing this mob is Abe (Jeff Daniels), recruited from the future to manage the loopers and keep them in line, which includes a rather draconian retirement policy (don't these guys read their hiring contracts?) that forces them to "retire" their older selves when they are sent back in time for disposal—you get your gold-watch at the start of your career and gold lined cement overshoes at the end.  
That's the set-up.*  

Things get complicated, when Joe stands in his chosen field, waiting for the body-to-be to show up on the blood-tarp, and when it does, there's no hood, and when he looks into his target's eyes, they're his. Joe has to kill himself from the future.

You know that already. You've seen the set-up, read the poster.** But the implications, why that is, why "Old Joe" shows up with no hood, and what comes next...and next...and next...and then back...then next, would be revealing any of the surprises the film has in store. It's enough to say that, in surface detail, it's quite an ingenious little ride, and the plot-holes are kept cleverly out of sight and out of mind, and one has to assume a lot, such as evidently time-travel only exists as a form of going back to the past, and not forward into the future, as one of the characters does it "the old-fashioned way" (by growing old).

And one has to accept a lot of "fuzzy mechanism" mumbo-jumbo for things happening to Joe that ultimately affects "old Joe"—for instance the rather painful form of communication between the two, that is further demonstrated in the extreme by another looper (played by Paul Dano), which is just a damned clever device, but also grisly to the queasy point. Lots of violence...in some interesting forms, and one of the alarming things is how fast people get shot in 2044—you appear and (BOOM!), and director Johnson is doing some very clever things with the camera these days that aren't so derivative of other directors. That's good. His sense of time and timing in editing is still as razor sharp as it always has been, and he's not afraid to mess with aspect-ratios for effect. The ideas are good, and one thing Johnson has always had is a clever way with dialogue, which is where Looper shines, time after time.

* ...except for one little tidbit of information that some of us have mutated to have telekinesis, but it doesn't amount to much—"no superhero stuff." says Joe "We can float quarters. That's it."  Yeah, but... It wouldn't BE there if it wasn't necessary. And it is, but only semi-so.

** And if anybody is wondering why JoGo-Levitt looks weird in this movie, it's because he's been given a prosthetics make-over so he has Willis' nose, eyes, lip-line, and thinning hair and does a rather inspired Willis-routine throughout the movie, especially in an interview with Abe where the resemblance and mannerisms are uncanny. 

Traitor

Written at the time of the film's release.

"I Wouldn't Make Any Plans, Man..."

Traitor is a taut, tough little thriller about the FBI (yes, the FBI) trying to track down a group of Islamic jihadists with plans to pull off a continuing string of bombings throughout the world. Their focus is on Samir Horn (Don Cheadle), born in the Sudan, and who disappeared while working for the government in Afghanistan. Word is that he found his faith working for the mujahadin, and now he's been tracked selling detonators to a terrorist faction in Yemen.

There, two FBI agents, Clayton (Guy Pearce, this time with a convincing soft Southern accent) and Archer (Neal McDonough) are tracking the faction's movements, and during a raid, Horn is captured, but will not turn over any evidence to help the investigation. Despite that, in prison, he is doubted by the fellow-jihadists as a possible informer to the U.S., and a target by some of the prisoners. Outside, he is not trusted at all, but as long as he's detained, he's not considered a threat.

Then, he breaks out. And he gets very busy contacting associates, sleeper-cells, and working on detonators for a coordinated attack.

At this point, to reveal any more of the plot might be unfair to anyone who wants to see a well-done "War on Terror" thriller, done in the shakiest "Bourne" style, with powerhouse performances by Cheadle, Pearce, McDonough and Jeff Daniels. Real tension is achieved throughout the story, as the stakes get increasingly higher. And writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff, working from a story by Steve Martin* (yes, that Steve Martin) keeps things simple and straight-forward--pretty amazing, given that his last credit was for screen-writing The Day After Tomorrow. Without much on his resume to indicate that he was capable of this, it will be interesting to see what he does in the future.

The other neat thing is seeing Don Cheadle in full "action-star" mode--tight, lean and fast, he pulls off several well-done fight scenes, while never sacrificing the wariness and intelligence in his eyes. At this point, it should be pretty obvious that Cheadle can play just about anything, and have the audience with him the whole way.

The view from 2016: This one has stuck with me over the years for many reasons: the excellent direction, Cheadle in full-on "star" mode, and the screenplay, that plays like a normal thriller (ho-hum) replete with shaky-cam, exotic, if shell-shocked, locales and a "trust me, we'll get there" air of non-disclosure. It then delivers on that tactic with one of the biggest surprises that year in movies—a surprise both wicked and shocking in its dark humor, but carrying with it a certain degree of satisfaction in its outcome, one that could be traced to Martin's sense of the absurd and his instinct for a killer punch-line. "You live by the sword..." you die by the sting. Traitor is more than a little brilliant in how it carries out its agenda, using a terrorist's tactics, working in anonymity, against itself. It still makes me smile...if not necessarily making me laugh.

 * Sleeping on it, Martin's participation seems apt, rather than surprising. The denouement is the product of a Master of the Absurd, and thinking further on it, in the War on Terror, Absurdity is only a realization away from the insanity of the unthinking zealot. Maybe in the War on Terror, we need fewer strategists and more comedians. "Laugh? I killed 'em!"

Steve Jobs (2015)

Lisa, LISA
or 
Another Opening, Another Show (Deconstructing Citizen Jobs)

I'll bet Steve Jobs might've wished for Aaron Sorkin to write his dialog. Hell, I wish Aaron Sorkin would write my dialog.

The film Steve Jobs—the second film on the subject since the man's death, as Hollywood always does things in pairs—is such a nicely honed dramatization distilled from Walter Issaacson's sanctioned biography, one could see why. It is not your typical biography; it does not follow the linear timeline of a life, picking and choosing events to highlight, as do many standard Hollywood bio-pics (like Ali and Hoffa). Instead, it is a perfect little construction (one could imagine it as a stage-play) that shows the private conflicts of a man at his most public—three presentation roll-outs before anticipatory crowds of the Macintosh, the NeXT cube, and the Imac G3—where the pressure on Jobs are great and the details of everything—relations, both professional and private, and the technological glitches going into those presentations—weigh heavily on the man.

Like Dickens' Scrooge, Jobs (played by Michael Fassbender) is visited at those roll-outs by the same core group of people (historically inaccurate, but this is not really a biography as much as a drama with a well-known protagonist): Joanna Hoffman (an almost unrecognizable Kate Winslet), Apple's marketing director—and winner of an award at Apple as "the person who does the best job standing up to Steve Jobs"; Andy Hertzfeld (the increasingly indispensable Michael Stuhlberg), a member of the Macintosh design team; Steve Wozniak (the best work Seth Rogen has done in years) developer of the Apple computer; John Sculley (played by Jeff Daniels, who can probably do Sorkin dialogue in his sleep by now); and Jobs' daughter by Chrissann Brennan, Lisa (portrayed by Makenzie Moss at 5, Ripley Sobo at 9, and Perla Haley-Jardine at 19) who, in Sorkin's screenplay is the catalyst for the character arc of the piece, as Jobs starts by denying his parentage and by the end, convinces himself to bend to the position of unconditional love for his daughter.

That's basically the "Pinnocchio" character arc—the inanimate being wanting to turn into a real human being, and by exploring, suffering, and some necessary self-examination realizing that goal. None of this resembles the source-biography. Instead, Sorkin has taken three pivotal moments in that evolution—coinciding with Jobs' roll-out presentations—to see how his relationships with key-players, personal and professional, has changed, revealing how the man has changed in the interim—the events leading up to those high-pressure presentations informing all in the process.

Those key players—Hoffman, Wozniak, Hertzfeld, Sculley, and Lisa—refract those changes in Jobs as he goes through his professional journey. In that way, we see Jobs through their eyes, like the witnesses in Citizen Kane, examining aspects of a complicated man who can be a bit of a cypher. It is a conceit, a construct, that has no bearing in reality to the actual events. Wozniak wasn't at the NEXT roll-out, nor was Sculley. It is doubtful that Lisa was there for any of them. But those are pivotal public presentations where Job was at his most public and naked. If they weren't there, they should have been, and that's the glory of Sorkin's screenplay. Years of conflict are squeezed into three comparable time-frames, eliminating extraneous details, side-bars, and anything that might compete with the subject at hand.* That subject being Steve Jobs.

Perhaps the better metaphor would be that, as a person, he went from his preferred "Closed System" to the more vulnerable, but more versatile "Open Source" (not that he ever embraced that philosophy for his Mac's). As with the machine, so with the man.  As "personal" as he wants to make his computers, it isn't enough (as much as he protests before the Macintosh presentation) that the things merely say "hello." That's a superficial greeting—surface stuff—but, the things themselves are impenetrable, un-customizable, one size fits all, take it or leave it, much as you had to take Jobs, prickly flaws and all. Jobs was simply Jobs and he did not adapt to the person he was talking to or dealing with (as Sorkin has it in his telling), until the ending, when the stakes couldn't be more personal, and he differentiates between persons in his manner in dealing with them. It's not so much "winning" all the time, as conceding defeat, reaching the impasse, or risking face to keep what is important.

That's all in the script. So, what does director Danny Boyle do? Pretty much, he stays out of the way and follows direction. There is the occasional directorial flourish—say, projecting an image on a wall superfluously to support a point of discussion—but those ending up being more of a distraction than help. Where he's best is in staging, color, design and pacing, the basics any director should be doing when he isn't busy (too busy) working out "look-at-me" camera moves. No, but he's as good at doing the inevitable "walk-and-talk" sequences as Tommy Schlamme is. The "West Wing" vibe is palpable in this, more than any other Sorkin project since that heralded TV series. And the acting is impeccable throughout.

Since I started working on this review, Steve Jobs has been pulled out of most of its bookings due to lack of box office performance. That's a shame. This is an imaginative, well-thought out and realized project, quite outside of what passes for Hollywood biography and, if there's some justice, it should be on a lot of year-end "Top Ten" lists.

But, then, the initial Mac didn't sell that well, either.  Sometimes, people just have to come around.

* That doesn't mean that the screenplay talks about the same exact things three different times. There is a lot of detail and and a lot of blank-filling of the events between each segment, but it all boils down to Jobs and the unique relationship he has with each person.

The Martian (2015)

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (the Reboot)
or
"I'm Going to 'Science' the Shit Out of This"

Matt Damon is marooned on an alien planet for his second film in a row in The Martian (based on the best-seller by Andy Weir) and directed by Ridley Scott. And, as befitting castaway movies, an efficient little movie it is, setting up the circumstances for the film in the first ten minutes as an astronaut on a Mars mission is left stranded on the angry red planet with no hope of rescue for at least four years. There's no hope that his crew can come back and get him because in space, no one can hear you say "Can we turn this bus around?" And even if you could, space mechanics (despite Star's Wars and Trek) and Newtonian physics would prevent you unless a significant body with significant gravity could help you turn your bee-line into a 180.

Like its themic progenitor Robinson Crusoe on Mars (which trumpeted on its posters "This film is scientifically authentic...it is only one step ahead of current reality!"), the film is only a few years from what is possible, given political and budgetary will.  There are scientific lapses—the gravity is wrong, for one thing, people walk with the same gait as they do on Earth, objects fall with the weight of Earth gravity, not the roughly 1/3 gravity as would be experienced on Mars (by contrast the moon has half of that—1/6th—so Mars walking would be less galumphy than on our satellite, but still less oppressive than Earth). It just goes to show the moon-landing deniers that, even with the sophisticated special effects of today, it would still be damned difficult to fake something that would pass photographic scrutiny (if they had a mind to accept it).

The crew of the Ares abandons ship and one astronaut...in a dust-storm.

But, back to the movie...there's no getting around it that unless his buddies can get around something, Damon's character, Mark Watney, space botanist, is going to have a long wait, so he decides to hunker down and find a way to have enough oxygen, enough water, enough pressure, enough food, and some form of communication for four long years before he can get off the rock...and he'll have to make an endurance-testing planet trip in order to get to that next landing site. As he puts it, he's going to have to "science the shit out of it" if he is going to survive the long wait.

"So that's why they called it 'Lonely Planet'..."

To the crew of the homeward-bound Ares III and NASA, Watney is dead, killed by a careening communications dish that goes off its bearings in a Mars-storm. That same accident cuts off all communications with Earth from the surface, so Watney is essentially marooned without help or aid. He takes stock—the mission was cut short and it was a mission for six—and sets up a rationing schedule for how long he can make the meals last and comes to the conclusion quickly that he's going to run out of food if he's there for as long as he suspects, given the next landing. So, as he relates in his running log—probably the worst viewed YouTube channel in history—he decides that he's going to re-purpose part of his "HAB Alone" into a greenhouse in order to grow potatoes. He's a botanist, for crying out loud, and, as one of his crew-mates (the now ubiquitous Michael Peña puts it) "it's not science."

How he does so is so damned clever that you're willing to go along with Watney no matter what lame-brained scheme he may come up with along the way. He walls off a large section of the HAB enclosing it in plastic creating a greenhouse. He goes out and digs a considerable amount of Martian soil (which can't grow anything), fertilizes it with the freeze-dried waste of his fellow astronauts and sets up a reliably wet, tepid atmosphere for hydration by taking oxygen (which he has) and hydrogen (which he has) and burning it (which he can, verrry carefully) to create water, nearly blowing himself up in the process.

But the fundamentals work. Soon he has a crop of burgeoning potato plants that, if he doesn't binge, will get him to the next landing time. Good enough. Now, he sets himself up with two more problems: communication, and outfitting his rover for an extended journey which he will eventually have to take to get him to a landing spot 400 kilometers away—a distance far beyond the rover's battery life or environmental systems. Fortunately, there's some stuff he might be able to use.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, they're starting to notice something. There's an orbiter circling Mars taking shots of the Martian surface, and the wonks at Mission Control are starting to notice something peculiar. The crew has abandoned the Ares habitation module and there's supposedly no one left alive. So, who's moving things around? Why has the rover shifted position from one series of shots to another after the Ares has taken off? In lieu of shy "driver's permit"-carrying creatures that the cameras and instruments haven't detected yet, there comes the immediate suspicion that the announced-dead Watney may have survived. Inconvenient, as they've already had the funeral. "Uh, remember that astronaut we left for dead on Mars? Well, we were half right when we told you that. We left him, but he isn't dead. Our bad."

As Watney puts it on his video log: "Sur-priiise!"

It's at this point that the usually dour Ridley Scott has his moment to be the curmudgeon that he usually is. A wonk (Mackenzie Davis) sees the shifts, reports it to Mission Director Vincent Kapoor (Kapoor? He's played by Chiwetel Ejiofor!*), who then reports it to NASA Director Ted Sanders (Jeff Daniels) and Annie Montrose (Kristen Wiig), Director of Media Relations, who say "It took so long to take it up the chain of command, he's dead by now!" Well, no, they don't say that, they say "Don't let this get out. Don't tell the crew. Don't tell anybody until we're sure of our facts" which is NASA-speak for "we don't have a plan in place or a budget for bringing him back, so in our eyes, he's still as dead as Schrödinger's cat!" See how up-to-date the science is? Watney could be perceived as either living or dead without a government grant! Take that, Interstellar! Now that's REAL theoretical science!

Meanwhile, back at the HAB, Watney is operating without a budget. He's appropriated batteries, augmented them with solar collectors, and a nicely warm nuclear generator as an independent heater and has managed to make the rover a longer-range vehicle that can be recharged during the day and operated at night and more importantly, be livable day or night. Good thing he came up with that idea first because his next goal—communication—will take a little trip to borrow some radio equipment from a not-too-next-door neighbor.

He's heading for the closest Mars Rover, which ran out of battery power many years before and whose home-base, Pathfinder, used to send back all its selfies to Earth. Well, with brand new batteries and a Swiftering of its solar panels, Watney sets up a little audio-visual show for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, if they happen to figure out what that spurious signal is being generated out of Mars. After all, it's been awhile since Pathfinder had something to write home about. Now, it says "there goes the neighborhood."

When Kapoor and company see his tire tracks leaving his habitat, they start wondering where he's going. A quick look at a map of Earth things on Mars show he's heading in the direction of Pathfinder and so, without telling NASA, Kapoor flies out to JPL in Pasadena and says "Ya know, that Pathfinder you've been ignoring for a decade? You might want to take a look..."

Very clever stuff. The sort of "necessity-is-a-mother" thing that's been intriguing since Robinson Crusoe and before to when you start thinking about how things were invented in the first place with just the things available at the time. Things like "duct tape"...

The whole movie has that "ya gotta do what ya gotta do" sort of feel that permeates all aspects of the story and gives it a bit of rebelliousness to it that tosses out the game plan and improvises no matter what anyone else says. That goes down to the story-telling, too, so much of which is done visually, aided and abetted by Damon's journals as the driving force, which, thankfully, is short on drama and awash with self-effacing humor (one of my favorites: "Seven days ago, I ran out of ketchup.") that still manages to make note of the uniqueness of the situation and its inconveniences. One of the running gripes Watney has is the library of music that the Commander of the mission (Jessica Chastain) has left him with, which consists solely of disco music. Thankfully, we're spared "Stayin' Alive" by The Bee-Gees (that's owned by Paramount and this is Fox), but the final credits song could not be more appropriately chosen.

The Martian is also, given director Scott, mercifully short of hardware-fetish (although it is there and taken for granted that we know about artificial gravity and such) and remains solidly "can-do/make-do" in spirit. The performances are uniformly terrific, given their scope, although Damon commands the thing in a "one-man show" performance. It is relentlessly entertaining, in a way that is uncommon in most Ridley Scott movies. Scott always seems to want to find the dark cloud in the silver lining and rub your nose in it. Here, his touch is light, but with echoes of past films in framing and ideas. We spend less time outside of ships and buildings watching them dance or evoke an image and more time inside with the crew. We're not distanced from the drama by set design or bleak pauses of recuperative silence. In this story, time and resources are of the essence, and Scott wastes little of it on indulgences. It's all for plot and character, rather than point.

The Martian is such a fun film to watch and is such an efficient entertainment, it made me suspicious. I wasn't sure exactly of what, other than there was no agenda from the director other than making as spare and bare-bones a film as he could. He wasn't trying to "out-Kubrick" Kubrick or throw some arbitrary ambiguity into the mix to give it some tonal frisson. There's no impractical schmutz in the air (except where it IS practical) or anything else to filter what is essentially a story about survival at its most essential. Could Ridley Scott have seen the story as a simple story of life or death and merely allowed it to "let it be?" I LIKE this no-nonsense Ridley Scott. I hope to see more of him.

In back: Chastain, Hennie, and Damon
In front: Stan, Mara, and Peña (the Marvel kids)