It went well, thanks for asking.
We are about 48 hours away from the Oscars and it's time to finish this thing out!
#14 Guardians of the Galaxy
The newest money-grab for the Marvel comics/production company puts together a group of galactic lovable losers. Chris Pratt is Star-Lord, who listens to Blue Swede and Bowie on a cassette tape and walkman as he searches space for a mysterious orb that he knows will make him a bunch of money. Right after he snatches it out of a laser cage, Korath (Djimon Hounsou, of course) and his goons try to intercept it. They're unsuccessful. After Korath reports his failings back to evil space badass Ronan (Lee Pace), he sends Gamora (Zoe Saldana), daughter of Thanos (a big deal, if you read Marvel comics growing up) to get the orb. In a real Cantina on Mos-Eisley situation, both Gamora and two bounty hunters Rocket Raccoon (a gun-toting rodent voiced by Bradley Cooper) and Groot (a regenerating tree voiced by Vin Diesel who knows how to say exactly three words) converge on Star-Lord while on planet Xandar to try and grab the orb. In the ensuing mess, all four are arrested and thrown in prison, where they meet Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista). Many prisoners, including Drax, are of the anti-Thanos POV, and before they can kill Gamora, they plot a ridiculous prison escape. The team is thusly formed.
It's a fun movie and a good romp through space. Dug the action, dug the visuals, dug the wittiness. Good times at the cineplex, and even if it got way too self-referential at times, it made a case for itself as a franchise that'll be around for a little bit.
#13 Interstellar
After the relative success of our production company's original musical "Oil Tutor" at the 2013 Minnesota Fringe Festival, I began getting my pitches ready to my two creative partners about what our entry could be for the summer 2014 edition of the annual theater smorgasbord. "It's called Noah's Spaceship," I told them. "It's a retelling of Noah's Ark, but on a spaceship. So there's this guy Noah, right? He's this hotshot engineer on a space colony who gets tasked with returning to an uninhabited earth to pick up the animals from the last remaining zoo and bring them back."
"So why aren't there animals on the space colony?" one of them asked.
"Well, they do have hologram animals," I said, digging myself further southward. "The thing is, they're getting bored with them because they only know how to do a couple of different motions."
"I'm confused. Does it take place on scorched earth, or on a colony, or what?" wondered the other.
"The first act would be them trying to convince them to get on the ship, kind of like the traveling salesman in The Music Man--"
"Wait...this is a musical?"
Not shockingly, it was a hard pass for both of them.We went on to make a much better play called "Comic-Con Clue", a riff on the board game/movie, only the murder takes place at a Comic-Con afterparty at a secluded mansion with guest of honor George R.R. Martin there to sign books. In some ways, it did even better than "Oil Tutor". I'll still make "Noah's Spaceship:the Musical". Someday.
I bring it up because I relayed this same story to a friend of mine, and when I got to the part about space colonies, he said "You mean like Interstellar?" At this point, the premise and plot of Interstellar was still being closely guarded surrounding the film's release. Unlike The Dark Knight and Inception (both #1s for me in their respective years), which more or less told you what was going to happen in their TV spots, all most of us knew about Interstellar was space, Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and an enormous, otherworldly tidal wave.
Here's what it is about: Cooper (McConaughey) and his kids Murph (Mackenzie Roy) and Tom (Timothee' Chalomet) are living on a planet that, exactly unlike Snowpiercer, is dying from being too hot and dry. Corn, still successfully growing, is served for every meal (hey, I like corn as much as the next guy, but every meal?) Meanwhile, Murph is freaking out that a ghost is haunting her room, shaking books around and causing general mayhem. They find that the force has written coordinates in the dust on the floor, leading them to drive to a fence. Deciding that the force probably wanted them to open the fence, they push through and end up at the new NASA "headquarters", where they find professor and former colleague John Brand (Michael Caine), his daughter (Hathaway) and scientists Doyle (Wes "flying plastic bag" Bentley) and Romilly (David Gyasi). Brand tells him he needs him as his pilot to take a ship through a black hole and to three potentially inhabitable planets to look into setting up--that's right--a space colony. The conundrum for Cooper becomes "do I try to save humanity, or do I stay here with my kids on this lousy planet and eat corn fritters?"
He chooses the former and the movie gets off and running. A fatal trip to Miller (the one with the tidal wave) has them trying to grab the previous astronaut's data while burning time; they calculate that one hour on this planet is equal to 7 years on earth, and they spend just over three hours. Now twenty-three years later, we meet Murph as an adult (Jessica Chastain) who is working for a much older Brand on trying to launch space stations. She sends video messages to Cooper, who absolutely loses his sh*t when he sees her grown up. But they've got one more planet to get to before they run out of fuel, and the results there are equally catastrophic.
I'll leave it at that...maybe I've Michael Stipe'd it and said too much. Interstellar is my least favorite Nolan movie, but that doesn't mean much and I enjoyed it all the same. At 2:49, it's a good 40 minutes too long, especially some of the scenes on earth that felt bloated and unnecessary. And for someone who had no qualms believing a giant pillar of smoke could chase Matthew Fox and Evangeline Lilly around a forest, I found aspects of Interstellar to be beyond far-fetched. That said, good performances, great to look at and listen to, and a father-daughter story that connects the whole thing like a constellation.
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