Interstellar Review

I saw this movie a week after it came out, and everything I heard was positive. One person even told me they read that it was the best movie in the last 100 years. If there is one thing I hate, it is movies that get too hyped up. Unfortunately, that is how this movie ended up for me. My expectations were far too high for this movie, and it only lived up to half the hype.

The Good: The movie was actually pretty scientifically accurate, except for one scene where their ship was able to leave a planet that was 130% that of the gravity of earth with a ship that when leaving earth had to have significantly more boost. The visuals were also quite good, except for Anne Hathaway looking way too much like a mustache-less Hitler, and the idea of the movie was also pretty cool.

The Bad: I think the actors were a poor choice for the film. I can't watch Matthew McConaughey without thinking of him in all of his previous chick flick roles, John Lithgow is a comedy actor in my mind, Michael Caine is Alfred, and Anne Hathaway is just hit and miss with her roles. The amount of science used in the film made it hard for me to believe the science fiction when it got pretty far past theoretic. In my opinion, the relationships between characters was more spoken than portrayed. Overall, it felt like a very good try at something that could have been a lot better with a little more time. Speaking of time it was 3 hours long.

The Science

The science in this movie was actually very well done and believable. A real physicist was commissioned to assist in the accuracy of the films science which is likely why it was done as well as it was. At one point in the movie they go to a planet that is very close to a black hole, and because of the time dilation that occurs as a result of the gravity of the black hole 1 hour on that planet equates to 7 years outside of that gravitational field. As crazy as it sounds this is actually real science and it is called gravitational time dilation. Relativity is a very big driving force of the movie, because they need to find a habitable planet before earth essentially expires. Overall, I felt they did a very good job explaining a lot of the scientific concepts in the movie, but you had to pay very close attention or you would be left scratching your head if you aren't familiar with those concepts.

The Cast

As said above I felt that the cast wasn't very strong just because of the type of actors that they got. I think had it been a better cast the relationships of the characters would have been more believable and stronger. A huge driving force of the movie is a father that wants to return home to his daughter, but the connection with them never seems that strong. In fact, that is just as much the direction as it was the actors. You are told from the beginning of the movie that Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is more interested in the stars and science than he is anything else. The first scene in the movie is Cooper being told that he needs to go to parent teacher conference by his step father, because that isn't the role of a grandfather. So from the very beginning of the movie Cooper is seen as a distant father. Sorry, that doesn't have to do with the cast, but I just realized it. Anyway, I still believe a different cast could have made it better. I have seen McConaughey in way too many romantic comedies, John Lithgow only in comedies, and Anne Hathaway probably would have been fine if she kept a normal length hair and attempted to look like a woman. I wasn't going to bring this up, but another thing that bothered me about the cast was Matt Damon being the character Mann. I am pretty certain it wasn't necessary and kind of took attention away from his character's small role in the movie. The whole time I was just thinking why Matt Damon for this role? It was distracting. You don't find out about him 'til half way through the movie, but I just had to say something. It was completely pointless to cast him as that role. "And that's all I got to say about that." - Forest Gump

The Outstanding Bad

I am a person that is very specific about continuity in a film. I know that no film is going to be perfect, but there were things that really stood out and bothered me. The first thing is early in the film there is mention of 'ghosts' that you find out are trying to communicate with them, because Cooper's daughter Murph, named after Murphy's Law, determines that books pushed out of her book shelf are in a pattern that she determines is morse code. Later these 'ghosts' communicate the coordinates of some location using binary. Here is the problem I have with that. In the movie the binary is represented by 6-10 lines in the dirt. However an actually set of coordinates converted to binary would look something like:

001100110011000000101110001100100011100100110001001100100011100000001001001011010011100100110111001011100011011100110011001110000011010100111000001000000011001100110000001111110010000000110001001101110010011100100000001100100011100000100010

I know it is trivial, but people notice these things. Whenever there is a movie where a person playing an instrument doesn't match with the music they are playing it bothers me so it would make sense that something like this would do the same.

Another thing that bothered me was the robot TARS. Maybe I have been spoiled by movies like iRobot, Bicentennial Man, Terminator, Star Wars, and every other movie that has a robot. The problem is that I don't think I have. In this movie that robot looks like a fridge with 2 1980's computer monitors on it. I can't even describe the way he has to walk. So here is a gif to demonstrate:

Seriously? What the crap is that? Then somehow he can turn into a 4 french toast stick rolling thingy, and have hook hands. This 'robot' makes absolutely no sense, and all that it caused me to do was laugh at moments in the film that were not made to laugh at. I knew I couldn't take this movie seriously the second this thing showed up.

The final thing I will mention that made me not like the movie was the scene in the black hole. I feel like they needed a way to tie in everything in the movie, and so they just did something ridiculous. I am not a scientist, physicist, or any other type of ist, but I am almost certain that entering a black hole will kill you. What actually happens in the film is pretty far fetched and after all of the believable stuff in the movie kind of just seems like an easy way out and a way to throw the audience off in the process. It was kind of upsetting.

Conclusion

Should you see the movie? Yes.

Was it visually amazing? Yes.

Did it live up to all of the hype? Eh.

Was I disappointed? Yes.

I was really hoping to get my socks blown off by this movie. However, that did not happen and I left wishing it was better. So if you haven't seen it yet I recommend buying matinee tickets and carving out a 3 hour chunk of your day. That way you will have only lost 6 or 7 dollars and 3 hours of your life instead of $10 and 3 hours of your life. Then afterward get some comfort food with that money you saved so that you can handle your post movie depression better.

Think Before You Post

Hello everybody.

I know it has been a long time since I have posted something, which really sucks. I mainly blame being employed for that. I am pretty sure I would be much more active in my blogging and social media endeavors if I wasn't racking up hours and XP in the game of life. You will be happy to know that I am now a level 40 web development manager, and have learned a lot of code spells. If you don't know what I am talking about you should probably play an RPG, or at least read about what they are. I don't actually play them, nor have I ever, but I have just heard people reference them enough that I feel I can accurately reference their gameplay style as needed. Anyway enough of that nonsense. Let's get to the real topic at hand.

I am a huge advocate of UYB, or Using Your Brain. I know it can sometimes be difficult to boot it up after not using it for so long (I am talking to you youth of America), but it is very important that we use the thing that separates us from the Mexicans...I mean animals. (I really don't have anything against Mexicans. I use jokes like that mostly for shock value to get a cheap laugh.) Today I am mostly going to focus on the underlying cause of our awareness of stupidity these past few years. 

It isn't new news that, generally, people seem a lot dumber than they use to be, but why is that? You would think with the huge leaps in technology that have brought us into the information age that we would have more intelligent youth solving the mysteries of science. Well we do have a lot of these, but they are still not as abundant as the rest of the gauged ear, completely tattooed, drug addicted, and sexually promiscuous youth that seem to be littering the earth. Not to say that people that have gauges or tattoos or whatever are unintelligent, but generally all of the morons I see all over social media making complete idiots of themselves have all of these qualities. They also seem to be very outspoken about everything and throw their every thought on the internet without regard to consequence. This brings me to my point.

The reason that we are noticing so many stupid people and an influx of intelligent people is because people are sharing their every thought on the internet. The beauty of having a brain is that you can have thoughts and not share them. Unfortunately, as of late people seem to have forgotten that they have that ability. So we see every thought whether smart, witty, stupid, informative, or useless. It will be surprising to all of you to know that I only post about 50% of the things that I had originally intended to post. That isn't even counting things that I had dismissed from my mind before even picking up my phone or opening my laptop to share it. For the most part I have probably put on average of 5 - 10 minutes of thought into everything that I have shared on the internet. Even then not everything has been a comedic gem or a thought provoking anecdote, and that is with me putting a lot of time and thought into what I share. I really doubt there are a lot of people that do what I do with their social media and sharing practices. So we are left with a lot of people posting nearly their every thought, and now we can see with clarity how stupid they really are. 

I feel that people that people who spend most of their time talking spend very little time thinking, and that applies to social media as well. Put some thought into everything you put on the internet. You will be less likely to read through your posts in the years to come and wonder how you were ever so stupid to have posted things like these. 

I believe that you all have the ability to stop the over sharing, and become a little bit better at filtering the useless garbage that you discard onto the internet for innocent passers by to read. Make me proud.

Thanks for reading.

Need for Speed Review

Ok ok ok...ok. I know it has been a while since I have written a review, and for that I am sorry. So I am going to make up for it by reviewing a movie that I saw yesterday, and knew almost immediately that I had to make fun of it in my blog.

If you are familiar with my style of reviewing you will know that if a movie has attractive women I am at least somewhat forgiving if it is incredibly stupid. Sadly, I don't think I can be very forgiving. My biggest problem with this movie is really just a problem I have with movie makers in general. If you are going to make a movie that is suppose to be realistic, and then you throw something in that is obviously not even plausible you kind of just ruin your movie. For example, in the movie they are driving a mustang - whose front end is likely just make of tinfoil, plastic, and fiberglass - (I don't think I used the hyphens right, but whatever. They should have something that separates a list and something else that can separate side note kinda stuff, or whatever it is called. Not just use commas for both. Everything seems to work for a while, and then you get into a situation where you have to use commas inside another comma separated part of a sentence and it seems wrong, and then you find your self looking at the sentence wondering why our language sucks so bad. No wonder immigrants can't speak or write in our language. Not even Americans can speak and write in our language. I often wish that I was asian so that I spoke a language that wasn't just a big trash can of languages, and so that I could be a ninja.) and the guy driving this mustang jumps over 2 lanes of traffic and lands pretty much on the front end of his car. Any real car would have been crushed like a soda can. Then after this impossible feat the director decides that they need to have the car lifted by an army helicopter by clipping 2 cables together through the windows of the car. I can't say for certain, because I have never done it, but I am almost positive that the top of the car would have been torn off. It would have been more believable if one of the huge bird things from the Lord of The Rings would have come and grabbed the car and carried it to safety. Sadly that was not the case, and I had to just sit there and accept that there was another hour of this movie to watch.

Another thing that really bothered me about this movie was how predictable it was. They made the plot far too obvious, and then tried to detract from the awful plot by having terrible dialogue and overly dramatic acting throughout. I swear it was like I was watching a daytime soap opera, except it wasn't daytime and no one was singing. They sing in soap operas right? You could pretty much call every shower that I take a soap opera. I will often times start singing some Pavarotti, and there is soap...because I use soap. I am just missing a large audience of stay at home moms that have nothing better to do than watch the shows that were purposely put on daytime so that people with half a brain wouldn't have to watch it, and so the people making the shows feel like they are contributing to something even thought they really aren't. Then there is this guy that is in a lighthouse or something stupid the entire movie, and has some kind of live video streaming app for his vlog "I'm Michael Keaton and I get to have a big part in this movie even though it's pointless". All this character did throughout this movie was give a play by play. His dialogue didn't even make sense half of the time. He is suppose to be this really popular car race dude with his app and he hosts some race called "The Lion", or "de Lion", as he says it, that is supposedly a huge deal. Yet, he references the main character, Toby, as if everyone is aware of who he is, and understands all of the small intricacies of Toby's life.

Don't get me wrong there were good parts of the movie. Like when people weren't talking, and when there weren't unrealistic stunts I was actually enjoying myself, because there were cars going fast and a lot of movement and colors. So yeah, it was a movie. So if you like movies, even if they are a little dumb, you could go and see this and waste a couple hours if you have nothing to do. If you are looking for something that will blow your socks off might I suggest saving your money for Captain America Winter Soldier. That is a movie I am excited about. So yeah...I think I am done now.

FIN