The Wes Andersoniest of all Wes Anderson movies, at least the live action ones. Every frame is a painting here, or a New Yorker front page, and in that regard this is also his most artful work. But The Grand Budapest Hotel is still a better movie.

After two failed attempts to explain why exactly I wasn’t thrilled with Adam McKay’s Netflix movie — brevity will only get you so far — I found this review by Scott Alexander to perfectly capture my doubts about the movie’s message. I agree with Alexander only about 60% of the time, but I can agree with 100% of his review.

A big reason Don’t Look Up didn’t sit right with me was its simplistic view of the scientific consensus. “Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists…” bellows Ariana Grande paternalistically.

Meanwhile, qualified scientists from reputable institutions of higher education act as petty and vindictive prima donnas. The linked article is one scientist’s story of having to suffer through years of academic harassment for publishing a paper that rubbed some of her fellow researchers the wrong way. From the abstract:

A naïve researcher published a scientific article in a respectable journal. She thought her article was straightforward and defensible. It used only publicly available data, and her findings were consistent with much of the literature on the topic. Her coauthors included two distinguished statisticians. To her surprise her publication was met with unusual attacks from some unexpected sources within the research community. These attacks were by and large not pursued through normal channels of scientific discussion. Her research became the target of an aggressive campaign that included insults, errors, misinformation, social media posts, behind-the-scenes gossip and maneuvers, and complaints to her employer. The goal appeared to be to undermine and discredit her work.

Goddamn scientists indeed.

An unexpected diversion that is all heart and no plot — not the most terrible thing in the world, but far from the year’s best animated movie.

Netflix has a corrupting influence on film makers. Could it be that good art needs constraints?

Witness Don’t Look Up: a two and a half hour movie in which everything is at stake yet nothing happens. As a government farce, it is worse than Burn After Reading; as a disaster movie, it is worse than even Armageddon; and it is much, much worse than Dr. Strangelove by any criteria.

If it was meant to portray our response to Covid it did a terrible job, painting science as all-knowing and the political-buisness cabal as less coherent than your average B-grade movie villain. Spolier alert: (almost) everyone dies at the end, and you (mostly) won’t care.

Good soundtrack, though.

The 1984 version showed that making a good movie out of a 700-page tome is a complex problem that can’t be solved in 2 hours 17 minutes on a $40M budget. It took 20 minutes and $50M more than that for Denis Villeneuve to cover just half of what Lynch attempted, but the end result is so much better. The story is what it is — between the book, the movie, the TV show, and the game I now know it by heart — but the casting, the pace, cinematography, score, the movieness of it, are all pitch perfect. A cross between Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars, noted our perceptive nine-year-old somewhere around the 30-minute mark. Yes, and more like this, please!

Viewing notes: we saw it on a 120" screen with a 5.1 surround system. If you have anything less at home I’d strongly recommend going to a movie theater. Yes, it’s nice that it is available for streaming on day 1, but you would be doing a disservice both to the movie and to yourself seeing it on a postage stamp. </privilege>

A few notches below Little Miss Sunshine, a movie of a similar sensibilities. Some changes might have improved it — e.g. why does Ruby end up at high-school choir practice because of a boy, and not because of her love of singing? — but none of it can correct the one huge flaw, which is that conflict between Ruby’s supporting her family by providing free ASL interpreter services and Ruby’s becoming a strong independent young woman is a zero-sum game which will end up in either financial hardship or broken dreams.

But, you know, the music was nice.

Spider-verse meets Gravity falls, resulting in a completely unexpected delight that really is fun for the whole family. The animation is beautiful, the pace is fast, the humor earnest and often physical, and the story intentionally misses every opportunity for cynicism. The photogenic family next door with the perfect vacation photos really is that high-functioning, fit and smart. ⊕ Some Eastern European cynicism is in order, though: given that these characters are voiced by John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, making them inauthentic frauds was never an option. Friends are there to support you, not tease you. The world doesn’t make fun of weirdness, it embraces it.

So, even though it premiered on Netflix, this is not your ordinary Netflix feature-length animation; it is actually good. It is also a triumph of believable character motivation and well-executed action sequences over a coherent plot. Thankfully, humans put much more weight on the former.

Interstellar is many things: a mediocre sci-fi story, a timely study of sociopathy, a schmaltzy meandering about love conquering space and time, an excellent showcase of near-future space engineering, and, sadly, a big budget Hollywood movie that grossly underestimates its audience. ⊕ I have yet to see Tenet but from what I have heard about its convoluted and unknowable plot, it is Christopher Nolan’s reactive formation to the many comments about oversimplifying and over-explaining that followed Interstellar. For an ever better example of a reactive formation see La La Land as Damien Chazelle’s response to Birdman winning the best movie Oscar over Whiplash and giving the Academy what it wants: more cotton candy navel-gazing. Ironic that the attempt also failed to win, this time to a better opponent.Foreshadowing is one thing, having one astronaut do the punch-a-hole-though-a-folded-piece-of-paper schtick to another while they are in space on their way to a wormhole as part of a billion dollar secret mission… Well, that’s a whole new level of cringe.

Hollywood rears its head in many other places, most of all the needless addition of superficial suspense to things that don’t need added suspense. Because a father communicating with his estranged daughter through spacetime is not emotional enough, let’s also add a hick brother who doesn’t want her at the only place where communication is possible, and may kick her out at any moment. Decades are spent on trying to get humans off Earth, yet the big scientific breakthrough comes at the very last moments, as people are suffocating on the ground. While we are there: if the human civilization is capable of building a county-sized space habitat and the only problem is getting the thing off the ground, why not build it on Earth or under the sea, instead of using a few hundred frozen embryos as humanity’s only backup plan? But let’s not get into plot holes because, um, there are a few.

Which is to say that Interstellar is not an overwhelmingly good movie. The good, however, still outweighs the bad, especially for those willing to forgive all the pandering. The best of humanity is also the worst of it, and the best of American sci-fi in matters of technology also turns out to be some of the worst story-wise. So it goes…

There are too many things here that just don’t work: the acrobatics (cartoonish in a bad way), the believability (live action is less forgiving to cross-dressing, just ask Mrs. Doubtfire), and worst of all, the message, which comes straight from the Big State handbook of propaganda: a woman’s worth is in marriage and — maybe, under extraordinary circumstances — in her service to the country. Self-actualization is allowed, after much hemming and hawing, as long as you are actualizing yourself towards protecting the Empire.

Which is too bad, because the setup provided excellent opportunity for two badass female characters to unite against the common oppressor. Of course, uniting against anything would not have been received with open arms in Mulan’s intended market, said market working diligently towards exterminating threats foreign and domestic even as the movie was made.

One thing that did work was the matchmaker who really should get a show of her own. A Disney+ series of shorts with a match per episode, perhaps, culminating in helping Xianniang the witch find the man/woman/hawk of her life? Disney, you are welcome.