George & Tammy: Two Intertwining Stories

So, the wife and I saw George & Tammy on Showtime, and very much enjoyed it.  Neither of us are especially fans of country music, but we did also watch and really loved Nashville (the TV series) a few years ago.  So much so, that we went to a concert with some of the Nashville stars at the Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden.  (I guess we're secret country & western fans.)

Now, speaking for myself, I of course did know Tammy Wynette's blockbuster hit, "Stand By Your Man". But I'd never heard of most of other songs performed in George & Tammy, and the real joy of the limited six-episode series for me was the discovery of great country songs that were new to me.  Like "Two Story House," released by Tammy and George in 1980, with a catchy melody and a brilliant lyric (song written by Tammy, with David Lindsey and Glenn Douglas Tubb).

The story of George and Tammy --  portrayed memorably well in the song -- is actually very familiar, in reality and on the screen.  A famous male singer gets together with a talented newcomer female singer who is a big fan of his, and she soon eclipses the guy in fame and commercial success.  The personal lives similarly have those ups and downs, as they marry and break up (usually because the guy is an alcoholic) but they still love each other, to the very end.

But the performances of Jessica Chastain as Tammy and Michael Shannon as George were so incandescent and perfect -- including their singing --  that they made that old story very much vivid and alive.  And the particular ending of both the series and the true story of George and Tammy was presented so well in the final episode that whatever else you might think of the rest of the series, you'll think it was worth watching.

So bravo to everyone who made this series, and here's a video of the real Tammy and George singing "Two Story House".

See also Nashville in New York City: Reality Even Better than the Fiction

And here's about the closest I ever came to singing a country song ....

Ava: Believable Assassin

Checking in with a review of Ava, a relatively new movie (September 20) about a female assassin which just went up on Netflix last week.

First of all, it has some real star power: Jessica Chastain as the assassin, John Malkovich, Common, and Colin Farrell in her supporting cast.  Now, they've been any number of atrocious movies with big stars over the years.  But Ava isn't among them.  It's a pretty good movie, lifted by the likes of just hearing Malkovich talk.

And the fight scenes are good.  I don't know, are there assassins of either gender in real life who can take on and out 20 people coming at you?  Probably not.  But Ava was convincing.

And so was the worn narrative of your own organization turning against you, because you some sort of weak spot (in Ava's case, talking to the mark about why he or she thought Ava was about to kill them).  This narrative was convincing as soon as it got to the point where you couldn't tell who was going to survive or not, and when.  This included the effective question mark at the very end.

So, if you're up for a somewhat offbeat assassin movie, with characters who manage to be believable because of acting more than the script, give Ava a shot.   And make sure no one like her gets too close to you in real life.

 

Interstellar: 2001 meets Time for the Stars, with a Touch of Frequency

I just saw Interstellar in IMAX in New York City, in what the theater announced to be the second biggest IMAX screen in the world (the largest is in Sydney, Australia). Was the movie up to the theater?  Well, until the last 30 or so minutes I'd say it was - a masterpiece in many ways.   But the ending - or, at least, the science of the ending - just didn't do it for me.

The two best parts of the movie - in addition to the powerful story of an astronaut taking a ship through a black hole near Saturn, to save the human race from ecological disaster - was the computer on the ship, and the way that going in or near a black hole slows down time, so the astronaut and crew age at at a normal rate while the people back on Earth, aging at their normal rate, age much more quickly, where hours in space equal years and decades on Earth.

The computer - TARS by name - was a worthy homage and successor to HAL of 2001, smart-talking, funny, sage, and brave.   It - the computer doesn't want to be referred to as "he" - looks good as a walking rectangle with a pair of wide stilts for legs.   There have been lots of computers on spaceships over the years - including Star Trek - but TARS is far and away the best.

The aging effects were beautifully done, with Matthew McConaughey putting in his best work in this movie and indeed right up there with his riveting performances on television and in the movies in the past few years.  Jessica Chastain is also excellent as his daughter who becomes the same age as her father - at the same time as her father - as the plot progresses.   All of this was reminiscent of Robert Heinlein's classic juvenile science fiction novel, Time for the Stars, except Interstellar situates these personal paradoxes in a much grander story.

So far, so great.  The special effects were also outstanding, and better in many ways than previous state of the art movies in space like the second Star Wars trilogy.   The science, too, was good, and made Interstellar, until this point, a fine hard science fiction movie - one, moreover, with real heart.

But then came the ending, which hinged on father/daughter communication across time.  In this case, I saw this done far better in the father/son communication across time via ham radio in Frequency, a very well controlled, tight little movie.   In the case of Interstellar, the time travel depends upon a murky interpretation of quantum mechanics, which not only verged on the mystical, as quantum mechanics always does, but withdrew the strong mix of hard science and human emotion which worked so well in the rest of the movie.  Instead, we got superb emotion, but situated in an unclear, metaphysical base.

Nonetheless, I'd strongly recommend Interstellar, for the first two-and-a-half hours the movie, which were exceptional science fiction and movie-making indeed.