thoughts on The Words (spoilers)

We open on a renowned writer named Clay Hammond (Dennis Quaid) giving a reading in a packed auditorium.  He narrates the story of aspiring writer Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper), who, as the story begins, is told by his father (J.K. Simmons) that he needs to stop asking him for money all the time and get a real job.  Rory winds up working in publishing and marrying his girlfriend, Dora (Zoe Saldana).  The couple honeymoons in Paris, where Dora buys a beautiful leather satchel for Rory secondhand.  When they return to the United States and Rory opens the satchel, he finds an old manuscript.  He types it up on his computer, not changing a word or even correcting the spelling mistakes.  When Dora uses his computer, she finds it and reads it; she tells Rory that it's beautiful, and so different from his usual writing.  His "usual writing" keeps getting rejected by publishers, but they like this one, so he passes it off as his own, winning major awards and getting other, previously rejected, work published.  Everything is going along well until he meets the actual writer of the book (Jeremy Irons), who tells Rory his story.  And so we have a story...within a story...within a story, with Clay narrating first to his audience, then to a grad student/potential lover played by Olivia Wilde, and the writer narrating to Rory.  The main conflicts of the movie, then, are whether the writer or Rory himself will reveal Rory as a plagiarist; what the consequences will be if the truth is revealed; and whether Clay's story is, in fact, a fictionalized confession of the plagiarism.

Rory isn't a terribly likable character.  In one of his very first scenes, he yells at his dad for not believing in his writing career, then laughs in his face when his father offers him a job.  He also desperately, melodramatically yells at Dora at one point before he has made it big that this wasn't how his life was supposed to turn out; she asks how that's supposed to make her feel.  When he eventually tells her that he didn't write his career-making novel himself, he accuses her of knowing all along and just wanting it to have been written by him.  In other words, he blames everyone else for his own shortcomings and mistakes and lashes out at people who have, from what we see, been fairly supportive of him.  Because of this, it's hard to care about what happens to him.  The story that Jeremy Irons tells (which we see play out) also isn't terribly compelling, and it starts too late in the film for us to care about the characters in it, either.  Dennis Quaid and Olivia Wilde have pretty good chemistry, and Clay's narration adds a bit of suspense, but as a whole, the film is kind of a mess, with too many layers and not enough attention paid to any of the characters.

thoughts on Interstellar

In what appears to be the relatively near future, food is scarce, and Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) works as a farmer, as, we're told, do most people, though he was educated as an engineer and once worked for NASA.  It's unclear whether corn is the only food available, but everything we see anyone eat is corn-based, and rampant dust storms are a way of life.  Technology appears to have stalled (at one point, Cooper complains that were MRIs still in use, his late wife's cancer might have been detected earlier), and in school, children are taught that the moon landing was faked to bankrupt the Soviets, and that, in fact, space travel of that kind is impossible.  The New York Yankees play in what looks more like a high school stadium, suggesting a lack of people to both participate in and attend games.  Coop's ten-year-old daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy), thinks that there is a ghost in her room.  Coop doesn't pay much attention to this at first, but when binary code appears in the dust that blows in through an open window, he and Murph follow the coordinates it directs them to and wind up at NASA, which is still operating secretly. 

Soon Coop is recruited to go on a mission to investigate three potential planets that might be hospitable to life.  Plan A is that one of these planets might serve as a new home for those currently living on Earth; Professor Brand (Michael Caine) has been trying to figure out an equation that will apparently make this possible.  Plan B is to populate the new planet using fertilized embryos they are taking along.  Complicating everything is the fact that time will operate differently in space; on the first planet they are to explore, for example, one hour will equal seven years on Earth.

At the heart of the movie are a couple of key issues.  Coop's frustration with most of the people on Earth is that they are so focused on day-to-day survival that they're not looking ahead at all; for instance, we learn at a parent-teacher conference he attends that though universities still exist, only the very best and the brightest students get to attend.  Few people seem to see the point of many people going; they just need farmers.  Few people are interested in exploring new ideas or new technologies; they're just trying to keep people alive in the present, regardless of the quality of life they might have.  At the other extreme is Professor Brand, who eventually tells the adult Murph (Jessica Chastain), by then a NASA scientist, that he has known for years that the equation is unsolvable, and that there is no hope for the current population of Earth to live on one of the planets being explored even if one of them is hospitable.  What's the point, then? Why are Coop and the other astronauts putting their own lives on Earth aside for some theoretical potential future involving people who don't even exist yet?  Why is The Future of the Human Race more important than the actual, living and breathing people trying to survive right now?  Coop hasn't given up on the people of Earth, and neither has Murph, and we are given small hints that things might not be completely hopeless...but things look incredibly bleak for awhile.

A day after seeing the movie, I'm still thinking about and feeling incredibly unsettled by it.  In other words, it's quite thought-provoking.  McConaughey and Chastain give great performances, as well.  One issue that I had was that I wasn't exactly sure what the equation Brand, and later Murph, was trying to solve was going to exactly *do*, or why it was the key to humanity's survival.  It's certainly possible that I just missed or did not understand this.  It's also possible that the filmmakers figured that much of the audience wouldn't be scientists or mathematicians and would be willing to just roll with it.  This bothers me.  Because of this issue, it ultimately winds up being unclear *how* the main characters ultimately accomplish their main objective.  Again, it's possible that I just didn't get it.  It's also possible that it didn't make actual sense.  The film was well-done as a whole; there were just some unclear things that I found troubling.