First Man

For the love of Cats, what is wrong with Hollywood?

If you were to pluck a stranger off the street (a street outside of the current Greater American Co-Prosperity sphere because, let's face it, Americans have kinda utterly lost their minds at the moment, and anyway have never much been interested in anything outside of steroid-fueled millionaire date rapists crashing into each other on TV for points but I digress) and poll them as to the most significant event in recorded history evar, it's not entirely crazy to posit a leading if not the top response would be walking on the moon.

Walking on the moon. Those few, those happy few words (walking on the moon) may well describe the sole moment in history when the entire planet held its collective breath, looked up, and said hey, that's pretty darn cool. Even Yuri Gagarin probably proffered a thumbs upski, the bonds of test pilots and Fourier transforms transcending political ideology even as communists and capitalists were killing one another in southeast Asia.

Yes, I realize Cold War one-upmanship drove the Apollo program as much as oxidant. And, naturally, we must today apologize because it was exclusively a bunch of white guys who did the thing (I hereby officially urge NASA to next time staff their positions with Chinese lesbians or sentient plants or "rappers" if it will get all y'all to climb fully down off your high horse). But that does not change that a human person WALKED ON THE FREAKIN' MOON. The big ball you see outside at night? We decided to go there. So we did.

Shouldn't that be enough? Just this one time, can we agree to bask in the glory of Engineering, and, yes, also, the guys who put their necks on the line, and be satisfied? Is that not sufficient drama for the cinemaplex?

No, Hollywood answers. It is not.

Ascension

I started to feel bad for Tricia Helfer while watching Ascension. The success of Battlestar Galactica seems to have gotten her typecast as a space vamp. The Jessica Walters of science fiction. You'll never see her play Lady MacBeth, never see her cast at the narrator in Our Town. Her name won't come up if someone puts together an off-Broadway production of My Dinner with Andrea. I begin to fear she'll never once make it to a curtain call without disrobing. The only person whose career has suffered more from the Ron Moore curse is Katee Sackhoff, whose biggest role since BSG has been Robot Chicken.

But then I remembered Ms. Helfer is a millionaire celebrity and one of the most gorgeous women on the planet. She doesn't really need LabKitty's pity.

Hence the lesson: We shouldn't feel bad about the casting of Ascension; we should feel bad about its wasted potential.

Interstellar

If we are to believe Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, the biggest hurdle humanity must overcome if we hope to explore other worlds isn't delta-V or boosters that asplode when it gets cold or even Congress, it's our innate gregariousness. The soul-crushing isolation of space is enough to drive anyone bonkers. It turns highly-trained astronauts into irrational killing machines willing to risk the mission and their very lives in order to find some flesh to press. And if that flesh is family -- look out. You have strayed between a mama grizzly and her cub, and she got the crazy eyes.

Hollywood just can't stop hitting us over the head with Family. In Gravity, Sandra Bullock was saddled with a dead kid for reasons only a test audience can explain. Apollo 13 gave us Jim Lovell's son bravely watching events unfold in the classroom, as if the events weren't compelling on their own. The Right Stuff showed pains the Mercury program inflicted not only on the astronauts but also the astronaut wives. In 2010, Dr. Floyd left his kid back home with the family dolphins and WW-III. Aliens gave us Newt, Terminator gave us John Connor, and Abram's Star Trek gave us baby Kirk. Apparently a story isn't a story unless gametofusion is involved.

New and Improved MPAA Ratings

The MPAA is the bête noire of filmmakers and goers alike, for it is the final arbiter of what makes it onto the big screen and into our eyeballs. The organization was created in response to a turn-of-the-century Hollywood getting uppity about showing real life instead of reel life. An industry no longer willing to portray husbands and wives having separate beds, battle veterans saying "gosh darn it" when their buddies explode, or boxcar vagrants dressing in a coat and tie. Technicolor existence was emerging butterfly-like from the Politburo-style graywash of what had come before. Somebody had to push back against the immorality of reality, lest the nation's youth take up jazz and burn their draft cards. Thus was the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America born, later re-branded as the Motion Picture Association of America.

Hollywood Tachycardia

In addition to computer hacking, firearm safety, and the kind of apartments people working in the food service industry can afford, Hollywood seems preternaturally incapable of realistically portraying use of a defibrillator. The device's entire raison d'être eludes filmmakers. You can almost hear the haggling that went down on set just before cameras rolled:

 Director: Okay, in this scene we're going to do the paddle thing.
 Actor: What's my motivation?
 Technical Consultant: You're in tachycardia.
 Actor: I don't know how to emote tachycardia.
 Technical Consultant: What do you know?
 Actor: Asystole.
 Director: Meh, that works for me.
 Technical Consultant: But a defibrillator is useless for asystole!
 Director: Shut your cakehole, poindexter.

Here the director crosses out "tachycardia" in the script and scribbles "He's flat lining!!!" in crayon.

We find this mistake in every film imaginable. Drama, comedy, action, romance. Major studio blockbusters and indie cult flicks. Academy award winners and direct-to-video stocking stuffers. Bonasera, Science mumbles to Hollywood whilst seated in a darkened office and stroking a lap cat. What have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully?

Perhaps some explanation is in order. Read on.

Lucy

So. Finally got around to watching Lucy the other night.

I was warned about the "10% of your brain" silliness by the other neurowonks 'round the water cooler. Still, I went in under the impression it was a one-off quip or just something in the trailer. Nope. Accessing additional "cerebral capacity" is the organizing theme in Lucy. It's whole raison d'être. We're even shown a score card from time to time as Lucy's brain gets buff.

As many have pointed out, this is an old wife's tale science debunked quite some time ago. As Lucy writer/director Luc Besson has responded: NEEEERRDSSS! (paraphrasing). It's merely a fictional jumping off point. What if we only use 10% of our brain? What if there was a planet where apes evolved from men? What if JFK had been murdered by a cabal of New Orleans homosexuals? What if giant robots or space Nazis or Sam Rockwell clones are hidden on the moon? That sort of thing.

Fair dinkum. But unlike many films that get their science wrong, Lucy is pooping in LabKitty's wheelhouse, as the saying goes. (Do people still say that? Let's assume they do.) If only Mr. Besson had come to LabKitty, I could have supplied him a haute vulgarisation that would have been real actual brain science and would have worked even better for both his premise and his protagonist. For I am a trained neurobiologist (I have a diploma and everything!), so I can claim with some authority the real cinema sin of Lucy is that the plot is easily fixed.

But how? you are probably now gasping. What is this sorcery? Why does Hollywood continue to scorn the sleek and noble LabKitty? How much do you charge?

Fair questions, all. Read on.

Iron Sky

So, finally got around to watching the crowd sourced alternate history science fiction docudrama Iron Sky.












Yikes.

The Wolf of Wall Street

Finally got around to watching The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese's dazzling biopic of Wall Street role model Jordan Belfort. If nothing else, here is a film that will unseat Basic Instinct as having the most-paused scene in cinema history. Thank goodness for Blu-ray. I try this sort of intimate photojournalism and the guys working the developer machine down at Walmart call the cops. Scorsese gets lauded.

Not that I'm complaining. Well, I am complaining, just not about the exploration of Margot Robbie. My concern is the film's message. While the MPAA freaked about keeping the sex, drugs, and bad language away from impressionable children, the larger obscenity in TWoWS passed unnoticed.

No, I don't mean the Academy once again snubbing DiCaprio at the Oscars.

Hollywood goes to Grad School

In The Idea Factory, Pepper White recounts his experiences as a master's degree student in the mechanical engineering program at MIT. It is a tale of whip-smart youths coming of age in cramped dorm rooms and under crippling work loads (see the Val Kilmer vehicle Real Genius for a West Coast treatment). There is stress and suicide, triumph and defeat. But mostly defeat. The book ends with White passing his defense but then flunking the Ph.D. entrance exam. As a result, he decides to abandon academics altogether. For if MIT will not have him, what possible value does he have?

Aut Caesar aut nihil, I suppose. Still, when I read the book years ago, White's decision struck me as defeatist. There are many fine institutions in which he would have prospered had he chosen to continue his education. Heck, there's an automotive carburetion school right down the road here in Circle Pines I'm sure would have welcomed Pepper and his shameful MIT mechanical engineering master's degree. Perhaps nobody informed White about the perks of getting a Ph.D. (free Frogurt for life, for one. Also, your mom will call you "doctor." Loudly, in public, and as often as she can). But, no. Instead of getting into a Ph.D. program elsewhere, Pepper White wrote a book about not getting into the Ph.D. program at MIT.

Godzilla

Finally got around to watching the new Godzilla. (What can I say? I'm a child of Netflix -- the old-school version the mailman brings, not the fancy one you watch through the phone line. Get off my lawn.)

Yes, it was silly. The kind of story you'd get if you locked a bunch of teenage boys in a room, gave them an unlimited CGI budget and Red Bull enemas, and told them they had one hour to produce a script. But so what. It's a big dumb popcorn movie and I'm okay with that. At least the director could hold a shot longer than 50 milliseconds, unlike many working in the blockbuster oeuvre (I'm looking at you, Michael Bay. Watching Transformers is like staring into a strobe light). And the two hours of subliminal military recruiting was lost on me. War, like parenthood, is something I will only ever experience vicariously from the safety of my XBox. Yvan eht nioj, indeed.

What I expect from a giant monster movie are giant monsters whomping on each other and on that note Godzilla mostly delivers. Yet, there was featured on screen an offense so offensive, an outrage so outrageous, a derog so derogatory, that it demands a response. No, I don't mean making me think the wife was Sarah Chalke. (Whatever happened to Sarah Chalke, by the way? Haven't seen much from Sarah Chalke since Scrubs. Why am I writing Sarah Chalke so much? I don't know. Sarah Chalke).

I mean a blatant misunderstanding of the LGM-30 intercontinental ballistic missile, also known as the Minuteman.

LabKitty will tolerate cute kids in your monster movie. I will tolerate random improbable coincidences that move the plot along. I will even tolerate Blue Öyster Cult not appearing on the soundtrack. But when a Godzilla film demonstrates a willful ignorance of basic nuclear physics, that crosses the line.

This aggression will not stand.

Gravity

Sandra Bullock battles Newton's laws after an orbiting satellite disintegrates and rains killer space debris on her and her NASA coworkers, forced to rely on grit, wit, and sheer determination to return safely to Earth.

But wait, there's more.

Our heroine has a past. A dark secret. No, nothing explaining why a physician would be sent to fix the Hubble. Rather, she has suffered the tragic loss of a child. She is a tot mom, to use the screeching harpy vernacular. Or was, to use the tense-correct vernacular.

You hear that, space debris?

Now it's personal.