movie review

[calimac]

"I found myself cycling between appreciation and cringing, almost in time with the action."

That sounds almost like me on Peter Jackson, but it isn't.

It's retired astronaut Marsha Ivins on Gravity.

Comments

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

I've come to the conclusion that in general, no fiction can stand up to being read/viewed by a genuine expert. I had to ask womzilla to stop ruining CSI for me by pausing the show to explain that computers just can't do that. This summer, because a student had to, I read Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks,, and while it got the plague and some aspects of 17th-century England right, I just knew too much about the time's scientific thought and theology to accept it; I enjoyed the plot and all, but the book left a bad, anachronistic aftertaste. A friend pointed out errors in Bob Shea's Shike. I guess I try to enjoy the ride at the time and learn the errors later; if I can't do that, I choose between curiosity and pedantic annoyance.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The problem with these errors is that, if you're not an expert, you'll be fed false information, and the better the fiction is as art, the more likely you are to absorb it unconsciously. This has become very evident in Tolkien studies, where it's become routine to find scholars attributing events and motivations to the book that occur only in the movies. It's a lot more serious of a problem when the errors are those of scientific fact.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

I'm really appalled, though I guess not too surprised, that even scholars could be that influenced by the LotR movies. That's one reason I'm such a bulldog about finding evidence in the text and sticking to it. In many ways my undergrad training at DePauw could have been better, and I've come to think of Duke as my alma mater, but such errors (& some unrestrained pomo work) makes me very grateful for a good New Critical background in close readings.

But even with scientific facts, I don't really fault the movie (or TV show or novel) as much as I fault people getting their facts from what is, after all, fiction. I find it reasonable that telling a story would be a more major goal than getting every fact right. I love it when the artist does both, but I've begun to think that's very rare, and when I don't notice problems, mainly I just don't have enough expertise.

Finding narrative that compelling is a glitch in the human brain, but it's only one of many, and most people can become better thinkers if they want to. You can report the urban legend, or you can check it out. Or, third alternative, you can tell it just as a story, not as a fact.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how a New Critical education will help with the problem here. Even when (as with science) the flaw is getting facts from fiction, the problem is that facts or pseudo-facts get into one's head without a clear label as to where they came from. And movies in particular are an extremely vivid communicative device. When the movie is about facts, has a lot of actual facts, especially ones you can't get any other way (without being an astronaut yourself, you can't see the nature of the space light that Ivins saw, and the little movie cameras they took up with them don't cut it), it's tougher to separate the real facts from the made-up stuff if you don't already know.

In the case of LOTR, where all the facts in question are made-up ones about fictional characters anyway, the movie expands on points that contradict the book but which, having come earlier, the book is not specifically concerned to rebut; consequently, they fill the new person's head from the movie and aren't expunged by the book.