The Challenger Disaster

A couple of years ago, I grabbed an audio book of Dick Feynman's The Meaning of It All, looking forward to listening to a familiar voice from my college days.  Alas it was read by a classically-trained voice actor, rather than someone with Feynman's dulcet Far Rockaway delivery. Right words, wrong voice. I couldn't continue. Thus it almost was with William Hurt in the BBC movie The Challenger Disaster, where he delivers Feynman in a cross between Brooklyn and Boston. That said he gets the mannerisms completely correct, down to the flyaway hair and rhythm of his speech, even if not the accent. Annoyingly, in the interests of drama, they collapse a number of details, waiting until the last 15 minutes for Feynman to discover the critical bit of data about temperature and O-ring integrity. The real story of Feynman going to Washington against his better judgment, even while he was critically ill, is of him working with Gen Donald Kutyna and drilling down at Marshall Space Flight Center to understand, systemically, what was going on at NASA, and building a case for the O-ring damage and organizational rot bit by bit. Nice TV movie, but too bad we escape from the historical record to get there.

Man of Steel

Man of Steel is the latest remake of Superman. I had wanted to see it because Amy Adams plays Lois Lane, but we didn't get that far. We barely got off Krypton, a planet created by sexually repressed set designers, featuring floating vulvas with faces and symbols for communications devices, two meter tall dildos as prison cells, spaceships that require rotating 270 degrees in three axes to prepare for launch, armor which allows knife blades to pass cleanly through it, and a ruling council wearing crowns from a McDonald's Happy Meal. Life is too short for movies that are intended only for audiences of 13-year-old boys.

Olympus Has Fallen & White House Down

One of the things I admire about the old Jodie Foster movie The Panic Room is that there are no stupid people in it: every character acts intelligently toward their particular goal in the movie. Alas, in last spring’s Olympus Has Fallen this is not the case. The only character who acts intelligently in context is the ten-year-old son of the President, who, when terrorists attack the White House, hides in one of the secret passages in the building. Let's run it by the numbers: North Korean agents manage to completely staff the South Korean president's security detail, so that when North Korean terrorists strike Washington, the North Korean agents are invited into the White House bunker with the US and South Korean presidents. The president being out of commission and the plot having hand-waved the vice president, the speaker of the house is in charge. First reasonable reaction? Nuke Pyongyang in response to this act of war, perhaps? No, considering the terrorists' demands to remove American troops and the Seventh Fleet from Korea. Then, when the terrorists achieve their goal and get the self-destruct codes for all the US ICBMs and set the destruct sequence countdown starting while the missiles are still in their silos, does anyone think to launch the missiles so they blow up over the polar ice cap? No, they run around trying to find the self-destruct sequence abort code. I wanted to see this for an evening of mindless entertainment. I could have used more entertainment and less jingoistic mindlessness.

Fortunately, later last summer we got the second "terrorists take over the White House" movie: White House Down, which I can happily report is nowhere near as stupid, has a sense of humor and a plot that holds together. The bad guys represent the military-industrial complex who want to keep the President from doing something that might actually make peace break out in the middle east. We've got Jamie Foxx as the President, Channing Tatum as the cop who happens to be in the White House interviewing for a job with his daughter in tow, and Maggie (Ahh) Gyllenhaal as a Secret Service agent. Mindless entertainment, perhaps, but not completely mindless.

Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim mixes Japanese monster movies, cyberpunk, and a dose of the Millennium Falcon’s decrepitude in Star Wars. Monsters are emerging from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and attacking the coasts. The response is to build huge robots to wade out and kill the monsters. So we have a lot of kung fu fighting between robots and monsters. With some hinted-at backstory between characters, Rinko Kikuchi playing a gorgeous Japanese scientist who is a robot co-pilot, and the underrated Idris Elba as the squadron leader, it's a classic "let's save the world" story as directed by Guillermo del Toro. As my son James put it on Facebook, "Epic monster mecha movie. Shit. Go. Boom. With a side of plot."  Like The Matrix, it succeeds at telling exactly the story it wants to tell, and nothing more. 

Where Wizards Stay Up Late

Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyons purports, from its subtitle, to be about "The Origins of the Internet." Which it is. Alas, eighty percent of the book is about the mechanics of setting up the ARPAnet --- the existence of ARPA, the history of Boston consulting house Bolt, Baranek and Newman, the exchange of talent between MIT, Lincoln Labs, and Digital Equipment Corporation, the personal histories of some of the folks involved, the development of the first Interface Message Processors, which made the ARPAnet possible. It's only in the last chapter that they cover Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn inventing TCP/IP, the protocol that made it possible to connect the various computer networks together, Bill Joy's implementation of TCP/IP for Berkeley Unix, and the true birth of the Internet. I was initially dismayed by this imbalance, until I realized that the development of the other networks --- CSnet, the regional academic networks, NEARnet, SATnet, Alohanet --- is much the same story. The connection of those networks together into the Internet is just the application of technology. The real story, the real history, is in the invention of packet switching and the visionaries who decided to put together the original ARPAnet.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

James Thurber was one of the great American humorists, and in 1939 he wrote a lovely two-page, 2100-word story in The New Yorker entitled The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Most recently, the title has been co-opted for a film starring Ben Stiller, which is connected to the story only by the title character having daydreams. In the film, our Walter Mitty is in charge of the photo department at Life magazine, and is unable to find a critical negative from the star photographer on the staff. This allows him to stop daydreaming and start going out on real adventures in search of the photographer so he can ask where the negative is. In the process, he gets the help of the girl he's admired from afar. Once we get past the conceit of Mitty's daydreams the action can actually take off, and it becomes a very sweet movie, with some breathtaking photography.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a documentary in Japanese about an 85-year-old sushi chef who runs a ten-seat restaurant in the sub-basement of the Ginza subway station, where dinner starts at 30,000 yen.  [That would be about $300 to us gaijin.] Oh, and as a by-the-way, the place has three Michelin stars. Very simply, Jiro does nothing but spend his waking hours worrying about perfecting the craft of serving simple fish. He wants to continue to learn and get better at this. His only concession to age is that his son now goes to the fish market every morning. Jiro continues to be hard on his son, on his apprentices, expecting exacting work from them. He continues to use the suppliers he has known for years because they are the ones who understand his standards. And he, to all reports, turns out excellent food, and trains young men who go off and start their own excellent restaurants. I don't think that in thirty or forty years I will be as passionate about my craft as he is about his. But then, he has structured his life on his own terms, and only does what he cares about, without compromise.