Spanning the farthest reaches of time and space, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar will show you worlds so wondrous you’ll feel the floor fall out from under you and the breath leave your lungs. It’s an experiential, transportive sci-fi film that’s even more spectacular than advertised. The film is made a mess of, however, by a clunky and scatterbrained plot. Nolan burrows deeper than ever into his creativity to build an epic journey into the stars, but more of that energy could have been devoted to making his on-screen explorers, their relationships, and their internal struggles, as inventive and sharply-executed as the visuals. Still, you’ll be floored by Nolan’s outer-space opus, its imagery overwhelming in scope and wonder, its ambition boundless. This is a worthy moviegoing experience, despite its flaws.

Oh, the amazing things you’ll see: alien tidal waves thousands of feet high; planets where time itself gets bent and stretched beyond all recognition; clouds frozen into floating ice chunks; a black hole that looks unlike anything I’ve seen on film. But before shooting off to the edge of the galaxy, the story begins on the ground, in the dirt, on a farm owned by a country-bred former astronaut named Cooper (Matthew McConaughey). He’s raised a brainy daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy), and a son, Tom (Timothee Chalamet), with his caring, wise father-in-law (John Lithgow). Earth is plagued by parasitic dust storms called “The Blight” that have ravaged the planet of her crops and diminished the global food supply to frightening lows.

One day, Murph discovers a gravitational anomaly in her bedroom she claims is the doing of “her ghost”, who’s allegedly also been pushing books off her bookshelf. Following clues extrapolated from the anomaly, Cooper and Murph end up at a secret NASA compound where they find Cooper’s old mentor, Prof. Brand (Michael Caine), who consequently needs him to lead a mission through a wormhole near Saturn to track down a team of previous explorers who were tasked with finding a new home planet for the human race. His crew mates are Brand’s daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway), snarky scientist Doyle (Wes Bentley), the jittery but brilliant Romilly (David Gyasi), and a walking homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey, a talking robot named TARS who looks like a mobile version of the monolith from Kubrick’s masterpiece. Cooper accepts the mission, and doesn’t know when he’ll be able to return to little Murph, who’s resentful and torn to pieces. Nolan cleverly pairs the image of Cooper speeding away from the farm in his truck, kicking up a trail of dust, with audio from a space shuttle countdown and liftoff, a shining example of his audacious filmmaking style.

The plot is rooted in complex physics, metaphysics, relativity, and other concepts richer than the average moviegoer is used to. Nolan and his co-writer and brother, Jonathan Nolan, must have been terrified audiences wouldn’t be able to keep up, because the dialogue is so over-explicated and reiterative (if they reference Murphy’s Law one more god damn time…) your ears will turn beet red. If clarification was the objective, the Nolans achieve the opposite; the incessant exposition and space-time mumbo-jumbo only make things more complicated, and the heady concepts swirling above it all only add to the confusion.

Cluttered as it is, the script poses some fascinating scenarios. A great example is the aforementioned time-bending planet, whose proximity to a black hole means that for every hour Cooper and his team spend on its surface, 7 years pass for everyone else on earth. An unforeseen accident that extends the team’s stay on the planet leads to the film’s most devastating scene, in which Cooper returns to the ship, opens his video mailbox, and discovers the severe consequences of his mistake. McConaughey, convulsing and drowned in tears, breaks your heart. This portion of the film is terrific, because it’s a case in which the big, bombastic on-screen action dovetails perfectly into a moment of raw human emotion. It clicks, and it’s divine.

An older Murph is played by Jessica Chastain, whose poise as an actor makes her the film’s second-biggest boon, next to McConaughey. Cooper and Murph’s inter-dimensional father-daughter relationship is the glue that binds the film, which otherwise would feel like a collection of unrelated sci-fi short stories. Matt Damon enters the fold at around the halfway mark as one of the original astronaut explorers, adding a welcome layer of mystery to the proceedings. Bill Irwin, who voices TARS without an inkling of robotic inflection, lends the film a surprisingly significant amount of warmth and humor. What’s frustrating, though, is that 50 percent or more of the actors’ dialogue seems to be fixated on tiresome exposition, Hathaway being the prime victim of this design choice. She tries valiantly to emote, but labyrinthine chatter about space-travel mechanics constantly gets in her way.

Where the film threatens to fall apart is in its final act, a prosaic series of events sorely lacking finesse. Nolan’s finales often come off as emotionally cold or overwrought because he’s so self-serious and obsessed with juggling pathos, plot twists, philosophy, and mind-bending visuals all at once. Interstellar is sadly no exception, with a climax so disorganized that you’re frantically trying to shuffle things around in your head to make sense of it all, too preoccupied with deciphering logistics to feel the full impact of Nolan’s message, which he means to be poignant, but ultimately thuds. The shame is, the message is a beautiful one, in which we’re asked to consider the preciousness of the time we have with our family, and confront the inevitability that one day, we will all drift apart into eternity. I was ultimately touched by the heart of the story; I just wish I didn’t have to shove so much space junk out of the way to get there.

Nolan shot Interstellar in 35mm, VistaVision, and IMAX 70mm, which gives the breathtaking imagery a sort of dirtiness and inelegance that fits the story well, while sufficiently supporting the grandiosity of his vision. The mind-boggling proposition of visually representing four or more dimensions on-screen has always been fascinating to me, and Nolan and his team (including Her cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema) have concocted the most awe-inspiring version I’ve seen. It’s encouraging to see a big budget supporting such an artful, sincere endeavor. Flying under the radar, surprisingly, is Hans Zimmer, whose tasteful, nuanced score is one of his best, floating in and out of scenes fluidly and emphasizing only when appropriate. His notorious blaring, thrummy horns are replaced by sensitive, heavenly organs, which is a saving grace, because the last thing Interstellar needs is more chaos to further obstruct its purpose.

Interstellar trailer

Summer 2014 is coming to a close, and on episode 2 of The Way Too Indiecast we take a look back at the best and worst movies of the summer as well as look ahead to our most anticipated films of the fall. From indie duds (The Sacrament) to arthouse studs (Boyhood), from mainstream cop-outs (The Expendables 3) to foreign knockouts (Snowpiercer), this summer has given us loads of highs and lows at the movie theater. The upcoming fall schedule boasts a wealth of films to get excited about, including the latest from David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, and Alejandro González Iñárittu. In addition to our summer and fall discussions, Bernard and Ananda go head-to-head in our brand new game, “Synopsis Scramble”.

Topics

• Synopsis Scramble (1:00)
• Best & Worst of Summer 2014 (8:15)
• Fall Preview (27:52)

Please subscribe to our podcast on iTunes and leave us some feedback. Also, don’t hesitate leave us a comment below if we missed a film that should’ve been included!

While the summer’s biggest blockbuster Guardians of the Galaxy continues to woo audiences, the film divides our panel in our very first episode of the Way Too Indiecast. On the surface, this multi-million dollar budget comic book movie from Marvel seems anything but indie, but director James Gunn got his start in low-budget B-Movie productions. Which leads into our second topic, indie directors breaking into mainstream movies. We discuss how directors like Rian Johnson, Christopher Nolan, Darren Aronofsky, and others have handled the transition from small indie productions to major blockbuster franchises.

Topics

• R.I.P Robin Williams (1:50)
• Guardians of the Galaxy (7:50)
• Indie Directors Go Mainstream (21:25)

Please take a minute to subscribe to our podcast and leave us a review on iTunes. We appreciate the feedback. Also, feel free to leave us a comment below and share this with your friends!

Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy comes to a close with The Dark Knight Rises and if anything the series is done being nice. Long gone are the days when little one liners would pat the audience on the back and let them know it’s going to be alright. Gone too is the series’ sense of excitement and adventure. The Dark Knight Rises is instead filled with a flat out serious tone that prevents the series from ending on a high note.

The Dark Knight Rises begins with Gotham in a grand state of peace. Essentially all organized crime led by the Joker in the previous film has been shut down with literally thousands of criminals locked up under The Harvey Dent Law. It’s been nine years since the last events took place. Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has become secluded to his mansion with no one seeing him for years except for his always faithful butler Alfred (exquisitely played by Michael Caine). Wayne now walks with a cane after years of crime fighting have taken their toll on his body.

We get introduced to a couple of new characters early on, one of them being Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway). Faithful followers of comics and Batman will know her as Catwoman, the slinky sexy antihero of the Caped Crusader universe. I don’t feel guilty giving this tidbit away since virtually everyone knows this and it is revealed very early in the film. Another character we meet is beat officer John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Levitt probably gives the best performance in the film other than Caine. Blake becomes a trusted ally of Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman). One of the few he can trust. Blake eventually gets promoted to the role of Detective after impressing Gordon when he hunts down certain clues that ultimately reveal what’s really happening in Gotham.

Miranda Tate, played by the luscious French vixen Marion Cotillard, is a mysterious billionaire who is trying to work with Wayne Enterprises on a new secret project that could allow Gotham to live in a more energy efficient manner. I had suspicions about her character early on, mainly because she reminded me of a character from the Batman cartoon that aired in the 90’s. However, I’m done talking about her character.

We all know by now that the main villain in Rises is the mask wearing, muscle bound brute known as Bane (Tom Hardy). Nolan’s version of Bane is a far cry from the abomination Joel Schumacher used in his terrible Batman & Robin. In that film he was a doping bumbling idiot of a bodyguard. Here he is cold, calculating and most of all, uncompromising. He is an out and out terrorist. Where he comes from and he thirst for destruction I will not reveal here as it is one of the better pieces of the film.

The opening scene of the film holds a lot of promise. It’s unfortunate that the rest of the film never quite reaches these heights, except for once. The CIA takes a few men in hoods aboard a small plane and flies them over some truly beautiful landscape. But make no mistake. This is no site seeing trip. They want to know the mystery behind Bane. Little do they know that Bane is actually one of the hooded men. All of a sudden a bigger plane is flying above them. Men drop from this second plane hooked to wires and grab onto the smaller plane eventually busting the wings off it and let it dangle like a carrot from a string. Bane makes a grand escape from this plane with a mystery man in tow.

Along with his thirst for pain and his conquest for destruction, Bane is a man made of rock. With his massive shoulders and gigantic biceps, he intimidates anyone who crosses. In most cases he would just grab someone’s head and snap their neck. He is remorseless. Where the Joker’s agenda was to playfully offer ways out of his traps for his victims while he would gleefully chuckle at their inevitable failures, Bane is here to merely destroy any kind of system. Whether it’s that of a city or that of a man’s soul, Bane simply does not care about anything or anyone. He is the meaning of destruction.

After the film’s hair raising opening, the film then settles into a weird rhythm that it unfortunately doesn’t break away from during the film’s remaining runtime. Other than one scene in the middle of the film, Rises is not exciting for a second. Gordon, one of the series’ best characters, is bed ridden for most of the runtime while he has the Levitt character running all over town for him.

The best scene of the entire film is a showdown between Batman and Bane in an underground fortress controlled by Bane and his henchmen. Nolan handles this scene with pure brilliance. Instead of letting the loud and intrusive score (by Nolan faithful Hans Zimmer) and flashy editing intrude on the scene, he lets the scene unfold in silence. Only the sounds of a waterfall ignite the soundtrack as Bane verbally and physically decimate Batman. Shots of Bane’s henchmen as they watch, almost ashamed to follow such a crass leader, are inter-spliced with the action showing how ruthless Bane truly is. The look on their faces as they watch Batman beaten to a pulp is at times hard to watch. Even they can barely watch such reprehensible evil exist.

Unfortunately after the showdown, the film settles back into a state mediocrity. The film trudges on for what feels like forever to a final conflict that feels way too sprawling for the series. I know what we are essentially watching is a comic book/superhero movie, but the final hour seems too illogical to ever really happen. Bane’s ambitions are not unimaginable, just the way he goes about them. Some of these scenes are interesting, but they always require a lot of faith from the viewer. For me it was too much. For the sake of the virgin viewer’s eyes, I will not go into detail.

After everything that happens with these climactic and insanely sensational scenes we are given a closing montage that is a little too ridiculous. One character is revealed to be a crime fighting torch bearer in a stupid wink wink moment and another is given a second life after we are lead to believe of his demise in a stupid gotcha moment. It’s too much and it feels like Nolan, who is a director who almost never comprises, has finally given in to his audience’s demands. I don’t think The Dark Knight Rises is a bad film at all. It’s very well made. All the dollar signs are on the screen and Christopher Nolan is still one of the best and brightest Hollywood directors working today. The film simply does not rise out of its consistent state of complacency. It takes itself too seriously and lacks the straight up excitement of the first two films. A summer blockbuster can be brainy and serious while it hurtles itself through explosions and vibrant action if it wants to, yes. But you still have to have fun while you do it too. Unfortunately, The Dark Knight Rises flies to close to its villain’s coattails to realize this.

The 2011 Oscar nominations were announced this morning with The King’s Speech leading the way for the 83rd Academy Awards. The film, which also led the Golden Globes nominations (but only took home 1 award), took 12 nominations which include; Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress. Surprisingly, The Social Network only took 8 which tied Christopher Nolan’s Inception and behind Joel and Ethan Coen’s True Grit which had 10 nominations.

Another surprise was Christopher Nolan’s absence from the Best Director’s category. But another person’s snub is another person’s gain as Darren Aronofsky earns his first ever Oscar nomination for Black Swan in the Best Director category. Some say he was snubbed two years ago in that category for The Wrestler.

Even though there were a few surprises, most of the nominations were fairly predictable, especially if you paid attention to the Golden Globe and Independent Spirit Award nominations. Most of the leading nominations were mostly expected.

See who I predict will win Oscars

It was a very solid year for cinema making the award shows very interesting to watch as there was a lot of strong competition all around. The 2011 Oscar winners will be announced on February 27th (a day after the Independent Spirit Awards).

Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The King’s Speech
127 Hours
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter’s Bone

Javier Bardem, Biutiful
Jeff Bridges, True Grit
Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network
Colin Firth, The King’s Speech
James Franco, 127 hours

Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right
Nicole Kidman, Rabbit Hole
Jennifer Lawrence, Winter’s Bone
Natalie Portman, Black Swan
Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine

Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan
David O. Russell, The Fighter
Tom Hooper, The King’s Speech
David Fincher, The Social Network
The Coens, True Grit

Christian Bale, The Fighter
John Hawkes, Winter’s Bone
Jeremy Renner, The Town
Mark Ruffalo, The Kids Are All Right
Geoffrey Rush, The King’s Speech

Amy Adams, The Fighter
Helena Bonham Carter, The King’s Speech
Melissa Leo, The Fighter
Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit
Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom

Mike Leigh, Another Year
David Seidler, The King’s Speech
Christopher Nolan, Inception
Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg, The Kids Are All Right
Scott Silver, Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson, The Fighter

Danny Boyle & Simon Beaufoy, 127 hours
Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network
Michael Arndt, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Lee Unkrich, Toy Story 3
The Coens, True Grit
Debra Granik & Anne Rosellini, Winter’s Bone

Biutiful
Dogtooth
In A Better World
Incendies
Outside The Law

How to Train Your Dragon
The Illusionist
Toy Story 3

Black Swan
Inception
The King’s Speech
The Social Network
True Grit

Alice in Wonderland
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I
Inception
The King’s Speech
True Grit

Alice in Wonderland
I Am Love
The King’s Speech
The Tempest
True Grit

“Coming Home”, Country Strong
“I See the Light”, Tangled
“If I Rise”, 127 Hours
“We Belong Together”, Toy Story 3

How to Train Your Dragon, John Powell
Inception, Hans Zimmer
The King’s Speech, Alexandre Desplat
127 Hours, A.R. Rahman
The Social Network, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

Exit Through the Gift Shop
Gasland
Inside Job
Restrepo
Waste Land

Black Swan
The Fighter
The King’s Speech
127 Hours
The Social Network

Barney’s Version
The Way Back
The Wolfman

Inception
Toy Story 3
TRON: Legacy
True Grit
Unstoppable

Inception
The King’s Speech
Salt
The Social Network
True Grit

Alice in Wonderland
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
Hereafter
Inception
Iron Man 2

Killing in the Name
Poster Girl
Strangers No More
Sun Comes Up
The Warriors of Qiugang

Day & Night
The Gruffalo
Let’s Pollute
The Lost Thing
Madagascar, carnet de voyage (Madagascar, a Journey Diary)

The Confession
The Crush
God of Love
Na Wewe
Wish 143

You know it’s a good movie when you have such high expectations for it and after seeing it, it surpasses what you expected. In fact, it made me want to go see it again in the theater, something I never do. Thanks to the brilliant director, Christopher Nolan, The Dark Knight is easily one of the best superhero movies of all time.

This relatively long movie (2hr 30mins) flys by so quickly due to the non-stop action and fast scenes. You don’t get a chance to breathe. It’s the highest rated movie currently on IMdb’s website (granted it’s only been out for a week). This movie follows the previous Batman movie Christopher Nolan directed, Batman Begins, in that it is not your typical superhero movie. It is much more realistic and believable. Much as the title subtly states, this movie has a dark mood to it. It’s chaotic and mesmerizing.

I’ll say it now, I will be completely surprised if Heath Ledger doesn’t win an Oscar for his role. The Joker is played absolutely perfect. You honestly get the feeling that the character is an unbalanced maniac. Christian Bale was solid as well. Some parts had me wondering how it kept it’s PG13 rating. The storyline is incredibly fluid and logical. My only real compliant about the movie is a small one. There are some scenes where Batman’s voice sounds like an incomprehensible gurgled mess. It’s a small flaw that thankfully doesn’t appear frequent.

I haven’t seen a better movie more recently than The Dark Knight since There Will Be Blood. Although it’s a completely different kind of movie, it falls just short of a masterpiece for this genre. Highly recommended.