Leave the World Behind: Educated Apocalypse

I've seen Leave the World Behind, up earlier this month on Netflix after a limited release in theaters in November, described as a horror movie, and, even more often, said in reviews to be horrible.  I think it's neither.  It's an apocalypse narrative, happening in real time, and based on science and tech.  And I thought it was quite good.

Here's what I most liked about it:

• Clay Sandford (played by Ethan Hawke) is a professor of English & Media Studies.  Ruth Scott (Myha'la) says she never has been able to figure out what Media Studies is.  I'm a professor of Communication and Media Studies (at Fordham University), and I sometimes agree.
• As the apocalypse unfolds, self-driving Teslas are smashing into one another and blocking the entrance to a highway.
• Sandford's daughter Rose watches The West Wing -- but only the Aaron Sorkin episodes.
• The same daughter loves Friends.

Now admittedly none of that has much to do with the plot, but, hey, I believe in getting whatever you can from a movie, and the plot wasn't too bad, either.  Without giving anything specific away (so I don't have to warn you about spoilers), the apocalypse hinges on getting people even more at each other's throats than they already are in our reality today, and the solution is only attainable if they/we learn to work together. That's a crucial lesson, given what's going on day by day in the world around us.

I think the characters worked well together.  They each had a believable story, and one which was well synched to their age.   The acting was excellent.   Every person in the cast, ranging from Julia Roberts to Myha'la (whom I hadn't seen before) put in a convincing performance, not easy when you're playing a character in a story about the end of the world as we know it.  So I say kudos to Mr. Robot's Sam Esmail, who directed and wrote the movie, based on Rumaan Alam's novel.

The Guilty: Scalding Tour de Force

My wife and I just The Guilty, a scalding tour de force of a movie on Netflix.  I'm not going to give away much if any of the plot, definitely not the crucial parts.  I will say that nothing quite seems like it is.  And you've got to stay with this movie til the end.

Here's what I can tell you: almost all of the movie occurs on the phone.  Other than Jake Gyllenhaal, who puts in what may be the performance of his career as Officer Joe Baylor, on 911 phone duty because he did something wrong in the street on his job, we see just a few other minor characters.  Otherwise, everyone else, including some very major characters, are voices on the phone.  This easily could have been a powerhouse play -- a play for the ages.  Just like the movie (based, according to IMDb, on a Danish movie).

Joe fields a variety of nuisance and crackpot calls.  And then gets a call from Emily, voiced by Riley Keough (The Girlfriend Experience and more).  We also get to hear from Abby (Emily's daughter), Henry (Emily's husband, voiced by Peter Sarsgaard), Rick (Joe's partner, voiced by Eli Goree who played Cassius Clay in One Night in Miami), Bill (Joe's boss, voiced by Ethan Hawke) and other notables.  But it's all pulled together -- and apart -- by Gyllenhaal's stunning performance, vaunting from exhausted sarcastic to high voltage shatter for a range of reasons.

Kudos to Antoine Fuqua for directing and Nic Pizzolatto for writing this unforettable package of narrative, Gyllenhaal on the screen, and other star power by voice.  I'm no particular friend of police on the edge, given what has been happening for multiple decades and is finally getting some long due attention.   But, well, see this movie and add it into your personal equation.

Predestination: Treat for the Intellect and the Senses

Just saw Predestination on Google Play.  The movie is based on Robert Heinlein's "All You Zombies," in some to many ways the best time travel story ever written. Accordingly, a movie in most to all ways faithful to the original story should be in many ways the best time travel movie ever made.  Predestination was and is.  I enjoyed it just immensely.

Of course, I saw it having already read the story - how else would I be able to say it's in many ways the best time travel story ever written.  I therefore can't quite fathom what it would be like to see the movie without having read the story first - which, to spell it out, means you know the secret that ingeniously weaves its way throughout the entire story.   The last thing I'll say here without getting into that secret - which is to say, the last thing in this review which will be spoiler free - is that possibly the best way to see the movie if you haven't read the story is on Google Play, or some other suitable site that allows you to stop, ponder, and re-wind if necessary.   That, combined with the fact that the movie is largely narrative, with no big action scenes involving armies or mountains, may mean that the best way to see this movie if you haven't read the story is not in the theater.

And that secret, so brilliantly executed in the story as well as the movie, is that all the major characters except one - Mr. Robertson - are the same person.  That includes people who look not at all alike, male and female, baby, child, teenager, and old man.   And the story that ties them together - literally - is not only plotted perfectly, but given to us in just the right details.

My favorite touches in time travel stories are those that are almost casually dropped, having no seeming earthshaking significance at the time, but turn out to be major pointers to what is really going on in retrospect.   Shortly after we meet the character played by Ethan Hawke, whose face is badly burned, we come to see that he looks like Ethan Hawke because of the plastic surgery to repair his face. Not long after the hermaphroditic character played first by Sarah Snook claims her->his manhood, he gets the good news that he's no longer "shooting banks".   This sets up the biggest payoff in the story, in which he (still played by Snook) sleeps with her (younger) self, she gets pregnant with a baby that is her (yes, both her and hers, and, for that matter, also his, making the baby a kind of clone), and eventually she turns out to be the he who becomes Ethan Hawke.   If all of this sounds a little awkward and a lot complicated, it is, but the magic of both the story and the movie makes it mostly mind bogglingly wondrous.

Indeed, the story is so seamless, and seamlessly portrayed, that even Mr. Robertson (a Mr. Smith ala The Matrix kind of character, not in Heinlein's original 1959 story) looks a little to a lot like Ethan Hawke, which only increases our growing awareness that almost everyone is everyone in this time looped masterpiece.   The environments are filled with nice touches, as in the bar scene with the lady's and gent's rooms right next to each other in the background, subtly symbolizing that the lead character - who in the bar is literally talking to himself  (Snook, now a man, with Hawke) - is both a man and a woman at one time or another.    And the scene between Snook the man and slightly younger Snook the woman is also perfectly played:  he falls for her because he's in love with him/herself, the supreme narcissist, and she falls for him because he knows her so well, something everyone wants from someone they've just met.

I have no idea what you'll think of all this if you don't have a taste for time travel.  But as a connoisseur and practitioner of the genre - I wish I could say of the actual activity - I can tell you that if you are similarly inclined, you'll find Predestination a preternatural treat and feast for the intellect and the senses.  

podcast review of Predestination and 12 Monkeys


 three time travel novels: the Sierra Waters trilogy


two time travel stories (with more to come)


The Chronology Protection Case movie

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#SFWApro

Midnight in Paris: Time Traveling ala Woody Allen

A belated review of Woody Allen's 2011 movie, Midnight in Paris, which, considering that it's a time travel movie, it's amazing I didn't see and review much earlier.   The loss was mine - it's a wonderful movie - and thanks to my wife for suggesting we get it On Demand last night when there was nothing else to see on a cold, snowy night in New York City.

First, unlike Woody Allen's Sleeper, in which the hero is cryogenically frozen and jumps into the future that way, Gil in Midnight in Paris goes from 2010 to the past and back to the present like any decent, genuine time traveler.   The mechanism of the the time travel - the stroke of midnight on a quiet corner in Paris - is more like the means in Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court or Jack Finney's Time and Again, which is to say, close to magical - but still makes the cut as a legitimate time travel story as far as I'm concerned.

And it's excellent indeed, investing Woody Allen's sage, delightful repartee and style into a narrative in which Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and all manner of luminaries from the 1920s figure in our 21st-century hero's adventures in the past.   The neurotic Gil (well played by Owen Wilson) - a version of Woody Allen, despite Gil's Californian flair, as are all of Woody's male heroes - plays well and hilariously against these luminaries who no doubt are Woody's as well.  The attention to accurate detail of the 1920s, a key ingredient in my book in making any time travel to the past work, was mostly spot on.  The only slight error I caught was someone saying "science fiction" - although Hugo Gernsback did create the term some time in the 1920s, he much preferred the term "scientification" at first, and "science fiction" did not come into general use until a decade later.  But only a science fiction and time travel fanatic like me would know that.

The question always arises in these sorts of soft time time travel movies - that is, time travel without a machine or some sort of scientific explanation - as to whether the character is dreaming or really time traveling to the past or future.   Allen clearly answers this question near the end, when we're shown a private Parisian detective - who was hired to follow Gil by his about-to-be-father-in-law - running around in the age of Louis IV like a chicken without a head.  The scene is not only fall-down-funny but indicative that the time travel was not just in Gil's mind.  (Yes, Gil could have been dreaming that scene, too, but such solipsism is not much fun, and we see no other evidence of Gil dreaming - unlike, say, the Ethan Hawke character in The Woman in the Fifth, another recent Parisian movie.)

Like most of Woody Allen's movies, Midnight in Paris is not only funny but wise in the lessons it provides.  In this case, it's that everyone has their own favorite time in the past, but there's usually some of that still in the present, if you're lucky and alert enough to find it.   We enjoyed Midnight in Paris so much, we went on to see To Rome with Love, Woody Allen's 2012 movie, right after.  It was also excellent.  But Midnight in Paris is something special in the roster of both Allen's and time travel movies, and I predict it will become a classic.