The court scholar serving Hermann of Thuringia.

The court scholar serving Hermann of Thuringia.
The scholar

2014/11/21

Interstellar


An okay flick. If I were having a big party and wanted to keep something showing on the TV so that guests could wander by, watch a bit and then wander off, it'd be good for that. The FX and scenery are certainly good and the plot sufficiently long and drawn-out that no one would miss much if they were to get distracted. Certainly an attractive cast, with Matthew McConaughey as the hero, Anne Hathaway as the lone female among all the males in most of it and Jessica Chastain as the hero's grown-up daughter, certainly makes for plenty of eye candy.

My initial idea was to see Ouija as that has Bianca Santos in it, who is the star of Happyland, a series on MTV. But Ouija is only showing once per evening, after 10:00, so I figured I wouldn't see the horror flick after all. No biggie, I saw a few horror movies as a teenager but haven't seen any for many, many years. So I saw no need to break the pattern. Happyland is pretty cool though, a behind-the-scenes look at a Disney-ish amusement park.

2014/11/14

Rosewater.


Quite good. The Jon Stewart movie reminds me of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago in the way that it examines what our hero, Maziar Bahari (Played by Gael Garcia Bernal) has to go through. The Iranians who imprison Bahari knew that the brutal methods of SAVAK were worthless in obtaining credible confessions. The somewhat surprising twist is that Bahari doesn't hold out 'til the bitter end, never telling his captors what they want to hear. He does, but the world accurately identifies his confession as worthless because it's so obviously obtained under duress.
Very good look at current Iranian society and the relationship between captor and captive and the limits of what societies can do to oppress individuals.
Daily Show interviews on Rosewater. 
Update: Good review from Salon.