But I'm still waiting for Damon to find some darkness within, the kind that so richly complicates My Darling Clementine or Winchester '73 for those actors.) Indeed, The Martian does make the extravagant possibilities of scientific knowledge seem very cool, as well as remarkably easy to deploy with limited means left alone on a vacant alien planet, because Scott speeds through all the process and details that not doubt would have been deeply satisfying to watch carefully. (I really care for this actor, and not only because he brings to rare life these days the old big screen idea of plain American decency evoked by Henry Fonda and James Stewart. This explains the casting of Matt Damon as the astronaut accidentally left stuck on Mars by his crew: the guy we watch problem solve his survival has the firm, good guy moral values Damon's earnest good sense brings with him.
Adapted from Andy Weir's bestselling book, the film above all feels like a milquetoast piece of propaganda for a financially deflated NASA which seems starved for inspiring excitement and, well, inspiration in people. (It seems no mistake that the dominant images in this piece are scissors and what could be taken as a screen, thus the two aren't just fighting but perhaps performing a dance of cinema, edit and image.) The experience felt like Alain Resnais meets wuxia stripped of their humans and leaving us an endless set of possible magic.Ī film completely without magic is Ridley Scott's straight-forward, literalist The Martian, a lengthy piece of stranded-in-space hard sci-fi-meaning more realistic-with neither the flourished tension of Gravity nor the satisfying practicality and acute psychological observation of Cast Away. Even more remarkable, perhaps, is that because of the contorting, torquing shapes the flying carpet twists itself into (shapes mirrored somewhat on the gallery floor by dark pieces of fabric looking like erratically shorn, unilluminated brethren to the glorious neon rug on screen), I never was confident some of the shots weren't new ones being feathered into the loop my mind simply could never remember exactly how the fabric had shifted, folded and turned. The experience of watching this short-yet-long loop was an unusual one, where first I tried to fit it all together but eventually my mind either gave up or moved on to other aspects of the work, and I unexpectedly found that I had forgotten one of the (very few) shots in the piece until it reared itself in a different place. The origins, struggle and outcome of this burst of images changes subtly each time, each part seems to have a different power with each re-arrangement, the carpet sometimes cut in two, sometimes formed from two into one, the objects one time flung at each other and another flung apart. Yet the randomization of the shots and Kaul's honed editing of them keeps the actual original (if there was one) order of the shots, the narrative being imagined, always possible but never precisely fitting. In this loop, the scissors and carpet seem to forever fight an aborted duel in the sky, flying at each other and then coming apart in an explosion. That has yet to open so instead I went a-traveling away from it all. This year Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson, who are bringing their febrile The Forbidden Room to the festival, are practically taking over the ground floor of the Lightbox with their work. Luckily, the festival has thought of such things and has given me reasons to get away from the festival center.more films! The Wavelengths section, which curates a more radical type of cinema than the rest of the fest, has often featured video art pieces installed both near and far during the festival (you may recall last year I reported on a wonderful piece in Future Projections, the old name of the Wavelengths off-shoot for gallery art during the festival). Hey Fernando, are you at a film right now? Sneaking away from the festival always feels so wrong, doesn't it? We're here to grind through, to fill every empty moment in our day with yet another film or another few dashed words of writing, and so stepping out of the multiplex to grab a leisurely meal with a friend or to explore a new neighborhood inspires in me nothing but guilt.
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